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HISTORY OF 
THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


; - ‘ 


/S 
Students’ Edition A Piarhanary, 


BY ae 
FREDERIC L. PAXSON 


MARGARET BYRNE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA; AUTHOE 
Sy 
OF “‘THE NEW NATION” AND “RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 





HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
BOSTON - NEW YORK - CHICAGO - DALLAS - SAN FRANCISCO 
The Riverside Press Cambridge 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY FREDERIC L. PAXSON 


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE 
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM 


The Riverside Press 
CAMBRIDGE - MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 


PREFACE 


WHEN I began my studies in the history of the West some twenty 
years ago, the State of Colorado, where I worked, still bore the 
:mprint of the struggle of the preceding decade. The frontier was 
gone; and the frontiersmen there as elsewhere in the United States 
were adapting themselves to the life of a new century. Turner had 
already pointed out the significance of the frontier in our history, 
but the occasional historical pioneer who followed ‘ais lead must 
make his own tools, find his sources, and assemble his biblio- 
graphies. 

This is all changed to-day. The Mississippi Valley Historical 
Review has become the organ of the Westerners, while the sound 
scholarship of Alvord and his host of associates has cleared the 
ground. The time is ripe for this synthesis, in which an attempt is 
made to show the proportions of the whole story. My successors 
will of course do better, but none will complete his task with a 
firmer conviction than I possess that the frontier with its continu- 
ous influence is the most American thing in all America. In future 
generations we may perhaps become an amalgam of the European 
races and lose the advantage of a fresh continent, but we shall still 
possess and be shaped by a unique heritage. 

My debt to my indexer, Mr. David M. Matteson, is real, for 
he has at many places given me the advantage of his wide and 
accurate scholarship. 


FREDERIC L. PAxXson 
Maprson, March, 1924 


























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CONTENTS 


. THe AMERICAN FRONTIER OF 1763 

. THe Forks oF THE OHIO 

. THe SHENANDOAH COUNTRY AND THE TENNESSEE 

. THe REAR OF THE REVOLUTION 

. Tue LAnp PROBLEM 

. CREATION OF THE PuBLIC DOMAIN 

. THe NatIonaL LAND SYSTEM 

. THE OLtp NortTHWEST 

. THE WESTERN BOUNDARIES 

. Tue First NEw States 

. PoxiricAL THEORIES OF THE FRONTIER 

. JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 

. THE FRONTIER OF 1800 

. Onto: THE CLASH OF PRINCIPLES 

. THe PurcHaAsE or LOUISIANA 

. PROBLEMS OF THE SOUTHWEST BORDER 

. Tur Bonps or UNITY 

. Toe WaBaAsH FRONTIER: TECUMSEH, 1811 

. Tor WESTERN Wak oF 1812 

. STABILIZING THE FRONTIER 

XXI. 

XXII. 
XXITI. 
XXIV. 
XXYV. 
XXVI. 

XXVII. 

XXVIII. 


Tue GREAT MIGRATION 
STATEHOOD ON THE Ont0: INDIANA AND ILLINOIS 


THE Corton Kinapom: MISssIssIPpPI AND ALABAMA 


Missouri: THE NEw SECTIONALISM 
Pusyic Lanp REForM 

FRONTIER FINANCE 

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM 
JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 


102 


123 
130 
140 
150 
159 
167 
178 
186 
191 
200 
211 
220 
226 
241 
250 


vi 


XXITX. 
XXX. 
XXXI. 
XXXIT. 
XXXITI. 
XXXIV. 
XXXV. 
XXXVI. 
XXXVII. 
XXXVIII. 
XXXIX. 
OU 

XLI. 
XLII. 
XLIII. 
XLIV. 
XLV. 
XLVI. 
XLVIT. 
XLVIII. 
XLIX. 

. Tue Pusiic Lanps: WIDE OPEN 


CONTENTS 


Tue East, AND THE WESTERN MARKETS 

THe WESTERN INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 

THe PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841 
Tue Mississippr VALLEY Boom 

Tue BorpDER STATES: MICHIGAN AND ARKANSAS 
Tur INDEPENDENT STATE OF TEXAS 

1837: Tue Prostrate WEST 

Tue TRAIL TO Santa FE 

THE SETTLEMENT OF OREGON 

Tus “State” or DESERET 

Tue War with Mexico 

THE CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA 

Far West AnD Po.irics 

PREEMPTION 

Tue FRONTIER OF THE FORTIES 

THE Raitroap AGE 

LAND GRANTS AND THE WESTERN Roaps 
Kansas-NEBRASKA AND THE INDIAN COUNTRY 
**PIKE’s PEAK or Bust!” 

Tue FRONTIER OF THE MINERAL EMPIRE 

THe OVERLAND RouTE 


. Tue PLAINS IN THE Civit War 

. Tae Union Paciric RAILROAD 

. THE DISRUPTION OF THE TRIBES 

. Tue Panic or 1873 

. FRONTIER PANACEAS 

. THe Cow Country 

. THE CLosep FRONTIER 

. THE ADMISSION OF THE “OMNIBUS” STATES 
. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRONTIER 


INDEX 


258 
268 
275 
286 
295 
303 
311 
323 
331 
341 
35] 
361 
370 
381 
392 
402 
410 
423 
437 
448 
459 
471 
48] 
494 
502 
513 
522 
533 
544 
554 
564 
575 


LIST OF MAPS 
1763 


EASTERN UNITED STATES 

JEFFERSON'S PROPOSAL OF 1784 

THE Frontier LINE or 1800 

1830 — THE Frontier LINE oF Srx PER SQUARE MILE 
Tur INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841 

WESTERN UNITED STATES 

Tue NorRTHERN FRONTIER OF MEXIco 

THE OVERLAND TRAILS 

ORGANIZATION OF THE WEstT, 1850-1854 

RECESSION OF THE FRONTIER, 1890-1900 


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HISTORY OF 
THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


CHAPTER I 
THE AMERICAN FRONTIER OF 1763 


TuE frontier of the British Empire made its foothold at the river 
mouths on the Atlantic side of the North American continent at 
the beginning of the seventeenth century. For one hundred and 
fifty years thereafter its lodgment was precarious, as its scanty 
peoples struggled with the adversities of nature, the long commu- 
nication line to the base at home, the hostility of the native races 
that were dispossessed, and the jealousy of the other European 
nations whose realm was thus invaded. France, with a growing 
power over the whole St. Lawrence Basin, and Spain, with an un- 
contested grip upon the Gulf of Mexico and its hinterland, lacked 
the imperial agents with which to expel the interloping British, 
but not the will. The second generation of British colonials saw 
the rivalry of the nations turn to war, and then for a century there 
was intermittent contest for the empire. King William’s War and 
Queen Anne’s, the struggle over the Austrian succession, and the 
Seven Years’ War, were but phases of the effort to reach a state of 
equilibrium in Europe. For America these wars kept the border 
of the British Empire red with the blood of the regular troops, the 
Indians, and the settlers whose homes lay beneath the feet of the 
combatants to be devastated by them. At the end of the contest, 
in 1763, the isolated colonies were no longer bound only by their 
imperial bond and their British past. They had acquired a com- 
mon experience. Their own effort had helped to break the enemy. 
And they had been transmuted in the fight with nature and the 
alien until they had become the units of anew race. ‘The American 
frontier takes shape in the final years of the century of colonial 
wars, and upon the return of peace starts upon the conquest of the 
continent. Its British origins survive to mould its life, but its des- 
tiny and its spirit have become American.} 


1 The story of this struggle is best told in the writings of Francis Parkman, whose brilliant 
style and vivid historical imagination have made him first among American literary his- 
torians. 


2 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


The European settlement of 1763 followed the greatest military 
effort that Britain has ever made in America. Fighting took place 
at every strategic point along the line of contact with New France, 
and considerable armies were for the first time maneuvered in the 
wilderness. At the Forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburgh was soon 
to arise, at Niagara, along the route leading from New York by 
way of Lake Champlain to Canada, and at Quebec itself, the ex- 
peditionary forces of Great Britain, aided by colonial levies, kept 
so effective a pressure upon the French that the latter empire 
broke. France surrendered her American colonies at the end of the 
war, leaving to England and Spain the control of North America. 
The Mississippi River was made the common boundary of the sur- 
vivors. England, relieved of the French menace, turned to the en- 
joyment of her new domain, when there arose from the colonies 
the ominous question — Who won the war? and an affirmative 
American spirit took the place of the eliminated France. 

The peoples of the British colonies, who were ceasing to be 
British in 1763, and were assuming the new aspect of American, 
were not above two million strong. In the absence of any census, 
it has been necessary to arrive at the population of the colonies by 
estimates based upon casual accounts, figures of immigration, and 
conjectures as to the birth rate. In 1760 there were perhaps 1,600,- 
000 persons within the thirteen colonies. Fifteen years later, on the 
eve of independence, there may have been 2,600,000. In another 
fifteen years, in 1790 when the first census under the Constitution 
was taken, there were 3,929,214. An overwhelming proportion of 
the population of 1763 was American born, and in parts of the colo- 
nies there were many families that could trace five generations of 
unmixed ancestry, leading back in nearly every instance to immi- 
grants who came to America speaking the English language and 
familiar with the institutions of British life. 

Among the little groups that clustered about the harbors of the 
seaboard there were only four towns that could with reason be 
described as cities. Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charles- 
ton were the points where such wealth as had been produced in 
America tended to concentrate, and where the colonial aristocra- 
cies had their root. But most of the colonists were farmers, living 
on or near their property. Virginia, as the largest, was the most 
populous colony, and after her followed Massachusetts, Pennsy]- 
vania, North Carolina, and New York. The most characteristic 
figure of these towns was the merchant, for commerce was the only 


THE AMERICAN FRONTIER OF 1763 3 


industry besides agriculture that had been allowed to flourish by 
the policy of the mother country. Banking was rudimentary, 
transportation on land was unorganized, and manufacture was 
forbidden by the navigation laws. The colonial supplies that could 
not be made within the home by domestic manufacture came 
chiefly from the British exporters, were carried often in American- 
built ships, and were distributed by colonial merchants whose 
British connections kept them always in close grips with the hands 
across the seas. But the life outside the towns was simple and the 
needs were primitive. The deprivations due to the ban upon Amer- 
ican industry were slightly appreciated by the farmer who lived 
almost entirely to himself, and whose accumulated earnings and 
savings were never enough for the immediate needs of agricultural 
expansion, let alone purchases or investment in other fields. 

Although the British origin of most of the American population 
was patent, there were considerable areas in the colonies where 
alien accents and non-British blood were common. ‘There had been 
foreign strains associated in the first settlements, and there had 
come waves of various European continental emigrants. The 
Dutch of old New Amsterdam remained to found a sturdy aris- 
tocracy for New York, and to dominate much of the agricultural 
development of the Hudson Valley up to Albany and the Lower 
Mohawk. The handful of Swedish families, settled along the Dela- 
ware, made a slighter impression. The stray Huguenot immigrants 
had planted here and there a group among the southern settle- 
ments, while individuals among them had been dispersed through- 
out the whole British area in America. Not until the first century 
of British occupation was over, however, had additional races 
come in large numbers. It is with the German and Scotch-Irish 
migrations of the first half of the eighteenth century that the social 
historian has his first serious problem in appraising the materials 
in the American melting pot. 

The German flood came largely from the Palatinate after 1710. 
War, famine, and persecution were the forces which prepared the 
mind of the German peasant for emigration, while the open lands 
at the rear of most of the colonies provided abundant places for 
their lodgment. The great proprietors, like the family of Penn, 
saw profit in the quit-rents to be derived from numerous settlers 
on the family lands. Colonial politicians saw advantage in colo- 
nizing newcomers along the Indian border where their bodies 
might be a buffer between the French or Indian raiders and the 


di HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


British settlers. In the twenty years after the Peace of Utrecht, in 
1713, the frontier of New York received the Germans along the 
Mohawk, and took on the name of German Flats. They pushed 
southward, up the Schoharie, towards the headwaters of the Sus- 
quehanna, and made a connection with other groups that were 
working their way inland from Philadelphia. These latter followed 
the ridge between the Schuylkill and the Susquehanna. By 1729 
Pennsylvania found it necessary to divide the huge original Ches- 
ter County and to create Lancaster County out of its western 
end. The road from Philadelphia to Lancaster, ultimately to 
become the Lancaster Turnpike, was soon a crowded highway 
of migration, while from a river valley near its Susquehanna end 
came the name of the heavy, covered, Conestoga wagon, that was 
destined to be the vehicle of empire. Following the valleys south- 
ward to Carolina, and picking out the fertile limestone soil with 
sound farming judgment, the German settlers cleared a large 
part of the border as it stood at the middle of the eighteenth 
century. 

Almost simultaneously with the Germans came the Scotch- 
Irish. The particular group that bears this name emigrated from 
Scotland to Ireland shortly after 1600. Their descendants who re- 
main in Ulster are to-day as little assimilated by the native Irish as 
they were at the time of the first invasion. After a century of resi- 
dence in the north of Ireland, many of them, singly and by con- 
gregations, sought out a better livelihood and more tolerant sur- 
roundings in the colonies. By shiploads they came, to Boston, 
New York, and Philadelphia. Like the Germans, they found the 
near-by farm lands already occupied, and pushed on to the great 
open stretches where land was cheap, and where provincial policy 
preferred to have the newcomers. ‘‘ The settlement of five families 
from Ireland gives me more trouble than fifty of any other people,”’ 
lamented James Logan, the agent of the Penns, in 1730. But the 
qualities of temper that made trouble for the proprietors made 
also for independence and courage in the frontiersman. Less than 
the Germans did they go as directed, or await the order of author- 
ity. Perseveringly they pushed their settlements ahead, title or no 
title. When political conditions of the provinces displeased them, 
they turned to politics to capture the provincial legislatures. They 
spoke the dogmatic language of the frontier in the colonial towns 
where property and place had dominated. And in their political 
activities they showed the result of long training in self-ruling 


THE AMERICAN FRONTIER OF 1763 5 


churches, where the Presbyterian order created institutions of 
representative government. 

Mingled with the Irishmen of Scotch antecedents came other 
but un-numbered settlers from the Catholic counties of the south 
of Ireland. Many of these came as indentured servants, and most 
of them left fewer literary sources for the study of their culture 
than did the Scotch-Irish. Less clannish than their compatriots 
they formed no distinct group that can be readily isolated from the 
larger body of colonists. Another century was to elapse before the 
Trish of Irish extraction became a notable current in American 
immigration. 

A process of Americanization began as soon as the members of 
the alien races touched upon American soil. The change wrought 
thus upon the foreign language group made them obviously into 
a different race. Not less fundamentally, though less visibly, the 
English-speaking pioneers lost their identity with the England of 
the later Stuarts and the house of Hanover, and became American 
without immediate consciousness of their change. The course 
which development and life followed from the moment when the 
earliest settlements were planted, provides a basis for understand- 
ing the transmutation. 

The first foothold on the Atlantic seaboard was gained at the 
convenient landing places, such as the peninsula of the James 
River, or Boston Bay, or Manhattan Island, or the highlands on 
the Delaware above the mouth of the Schuylkill. It would have 
been difficult to maintain a settlement at any point not accessible 
to ocean-going ships. Around such focal points there developed 
thirteen colonies; and in each colony much the same forces helped 
to direct the lines of growth. The early maps show how settle- 
ment, as it spread, kept within easy reach of navigable water, and 
how the colonial farmer preferred to go many miles upstream, 
rather than penetrate a few miles into the roadless country. Not 
until the eighteenth century did a colonial postal service become 
either a possibility or a fact, and until the nineteenth century was 
well advanced the land traveler met hardships at every turn. 

Before 1763 the spread of occupation passed through two dis- 
tinct phases, corresponding to the geographical contours of the 
continent.” The rivers were the natural lines of penetration, so 


2 Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement (1897), describes this from the angle of the 
cartographer and bibliographer. His greatest disciple, Edward Channing, in Volumes 
1-11 of History of the United States (1905-12), not only retells the narrative of colonial life, 
but prints population maps that are a contribution to our knowledge of the course of settle- 
ment. 


6 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


long as they were navigable. At the places where the Atlantic 
streams emerge from the piedmont and start across the more level 
coastal plain, the waterfalls or rapids constitute obstacles that in 
nearly every instance induced a change of tactics by the invading 
settlers. Above these points navigation was broken. At the 
falls the boat with its cargo of pioneers and their goods must in 
any event be lightened for the portage. ‘Traders’ posts developed 
naturally near these strategic spots, and around them there have 
in later days grown up industrial communities, making use of the 
generous water powers that the falls provide. Settlement in the 
vicinity of the falls was no longer governed by a narrow river 
route, but spread out in every direction where the land invited. 

The falls line that can be shown on a map, connecting the lowest 
break to navigation in the several streams, follows the meeting line 
of the piedmont and the coastal plain, and separates two social 
areas as clearly as two geological. Below the falls line each colony 
kept to itself, and each river valley constituted a separate cell in 
which to generate British institutions in a new world. Above the 
falls line there was less marked separation, and a growing tend- 
ency for the outlying settlers of any group to form acquaintance 
and contacts as readily with their neighbors on either side as with 
their relatives downstream. By 1700 settlement had reached the 
falls line in most parts of the English colonies. In those southward 
from New York, where the rivers run most nearly at right angles 
with the Atlantic Shore, the settlers above the falls were already 
well on their way inland. 

Above the falls line, and running roughly parallel to the sea- 
coast, lay a barrier to expansion, in the form of the Appalachian 
system, with its multitude of parallel river valleys. Here, for one 
thousand miles, extending from northern Alabama to the water- 
shed of the St. Lawrence, the advance into the interior of the con- 
tinent was impeded, or deflected into such channels as nature had 
provided. Many of the eastern valleys of this system are cut 
across by the rivers emerging from the higher ranges, while the 
interior valleys themselves carry the headwaters of great rivers. 
The tributaries of the Potomac and the Susquehanna, the Shenan- 
doah and the Juniata, and the tributaries of the Ohio and the 
Tennessee, interlock sources and share these parallel channels. 
The incoming settlers, as they passed the falls line and climbed 
the eastern ridges of the first tier of valleys, found in this valley 
system a destination in itself that met the frontier needs for 


THE AMERICAN FRONTIER OF 1763 7 


advance from early in the eighteenth century until after the peace 
of Paris in 1763. 

It was a characteristic of the Appalachian valleys that they 
stayed the course of westward advance, and distributed north and 
south the families that ascended above the falls into the piedmont 
and the mountains. Mingling together, for the first time on a 
generous scale, the settlers from New York and Pennsylvania, or 
from Virginia and Carolina, found themselves cheek-by-jowl with 
the new-come Germans and the aggressive Scotch-Irish. The pro- 

-vincial attribute of every group was checked somewhat by the 
hostile attitude of other groups. The common qualities and expe- 
riences inherent in a struggle for livelihood in the wilderness built 
up for them a universal background of immediate needs. The 
children of the first entrants soon began to intermarry, for family 
life began early on the frontier, and the economical unit was 
neither the spinster nor the laborer, but the married couple. The 
divergent and contradictory traits with which the colonials came 
into the melting pot of the interior valleys were speedily sub- 
merged in the common nationality. Here, with the mingling of 
the social streams, the American character seems to have been 
born. Before any of the mountain settlements was a generation 
old it had begun to react upon the classes in control of the colony 
and resident in the older regions. The clash between the older 
regions with their desire to control the provinces, and the frontier 
areas with special and often antagonistic needs, enlivens colonial 
politics from an early period. It was the perennial struggle be- 
tween the landless and the well-established. It led to political 
maneuvers and gerrymanders for the control of colonial assem- 
blies. It brought forth from the new frontiers an early formulation 
of the distinctive American demand for a right to self-determina- 
tion.’ 

Before 1700 the spread of life in America was confined chiefly 
to the seacoast and the plains below the falls. Between 1700 and 
1763, the valleys were occupied and occasional adventurers crossed 
the mountains for a glimpse of the western slopes beyond.‘ At the 
moment when the French and Indian War (1756-1763) became 


*The name of Frederick Jackson Turner easily leads those of the historians of the 
frontier. All American historians have reshaped their views of the meaning of our history 
since the publication of his “Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in the 
Proceedings (1893) of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 

4 Clarence W. Alvord and Lee Bidgood, The First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny 
Region by the Virginians, 1650-1674 (1912). 


8 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the closing struggle between England and France, the colonials 
of the frontier region were so numerous as to make a large part of 
the force relied upon by England for imperial extension.*® In the 
deliberations at the Albany Congress of 1754, when the colonial 
officials met to plan for the common defense, a keener establish- 
ment than the British had erected might have seen a movement 
ominous for the continuance of the empire. It might have fore- 
seen that the reorganization of the intercolonial post-office, that 
Benjamin Franklin had just been allowed to carry through, would 
be as likely to break down colonial isolation as to help the empire. 
It might have mistrusted the nose for news that was being de- 
~ veloped in the rising list of colonial newspapers. The notable 
services of Franklin among the Pennsylvania farmers provided the 
expeditionary forces with supplies and transport. It was behind 
a provincial leader rather than a regular officer that they turned 
back the French at Lake George. Colonial self-consciousness and 
solidarity, with men who knew the actual frontier in the lead, were 
stimulated by the successes of this war; and when at its close Eng- 
land seized the moment as propitious to reorganize the empire, 
the provinces had been educated past the point at which this was 
possible. 

The British readjustments after 1763 were based upon the facts 
that the French menace had been dispelled, that the burden of 
maintaining peace ought to be spread over all subjects of the em- 
pire, that the confusion of colonial boundaries ought to be re- 
moved, that the outlying Indian tribes ought to be pacified and 
satisfied, and that the area of settlement ought not to be allowed 
to grow in disproportion to the number of inhabitants. To the 
colonial population of about two millions there were now added 
the French of Canada and the French and Spanish of Florida and 
Eastern Louisiana. It was as necessary to provide a government 
for these latter as to improve the organization of the older subjects. 
The fiscal provisions that Parliament enacted in the next few 
months aroused dissent and protest from the moment of their pas- 
sage, stirring up a cry of “no taxation without representation,”’ 
that could not be silenced within the empire. The provisions for 
local government produced an irritation as weighty, for they struck 
at the inherent traits and needs of border life. 


§ Eugene I. McCormac, Colonial Opposition to Imperial Authority during the French and 
Indian War (1911), was the first of the University of California Publications in History. 

® Clarence W. Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics (1917), is not only a 
learned treatment of this theme, but reveals in its author an unusual sense for values; 
Clarence E. Carter, Great Britain and the Illinois Country, 1763-177 (1910). 





10 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


By proclamation of George III, dated October 7, 1763, three - 
British colonies were added to the original thirteen. Each was to 
be a crown colony, governed directly from England, and each in- 
cluded a fraction of the recently acquired population. Quebec, the 
northernmost, embraced the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence 
to Lake Nipissing and the region of the Hudson’s Bay Company. 
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York found in Que- 
bee a northern neighbor and a newly defined boundary. Moun- 
tainous northern extremities had already constituted a practical 
northern limit for these colonies. Quebec both removed the danger 
of French attack and made the limit definite. 

The Spanish Floridas, acquired from Spain in exchange for 
Havana which had been occupied by a British fleet during the 
war, were divided by the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola rivers 
into the provinces of East Florida and West Florida. The new 
northern boundary of East Florida was the St. Mary’s River, and 
a line from its source to the junction of the Chattahoochee and the 
Flint rivers. It would have been easy to mark this line if it had 
been possible to agree on the tributary of the St. Mary’s that was 
to be treated as a source. West Florida was for the time being 
bounded on the north by the line of the thirty-first parallel, north 
latitude; but this was in a few months pushed further north to the 
mouth of the Yazoo River. 

Between the new dominions of Quebec and the Floridas, 
stretched the thirteen colonies, all along the seaboard; and west 
of them the mountain valleys whose occupation was just beginning, 
and the great tract of Eastern Louisiana, still possessed by its ab- 
original owners and the handful of Frenchmen and half-breeds at 
Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Detroit. Here and there, west of the 
Appalachians, and north of the Ohio, was a fur-trading stockade 
and a corn patch or two, but generally the Indian Country ex- 
tended unbroken from Quebec to Florida, and from the watershed 
to the Mississippi and beyond. The original boundary claims of 
six of the thirteen colonies traversed this western area, for Eng- 
land had been generous in making the “‘sea to sea”’ grants of terri- 
tory that she did not own, and in nearly every province specula- 
tive men were considering the possibility of getting new grants or 
founding new settlements west of the mountains. To all of these 
the Proclamation of 1763 brought disappointment, for by specific 
mandate “all the lands and territories lying to the westward of the 
sources of the rivers which fall into the sea from the west and 


THE AMERICAN FRONTIER OF 1763 11 


northwest are reserved under the sovereignty, protection, and 
dominance of the king.”’ Colonial officials were forbidden to grant 
additional lands west of this proclamation line. A new crown 
policy was provided, in place of the old one which had permitted 
easy extension of settlement and widespread speculation. Growth 
in the future was to be personally conducted, with all the safe- 
guards of government control, and with the Indians pacified in ad- 
vance. The hardy border settlers, who had lived thus far in a realm 
little affected by effective law, were now to await the arrival of 
law and order before advancing further. Adventurers who had 
already possessed themselves of claims to thousands of acres along 
the Upper Ohio were cut off from the enjoyment of their ventures. 
From the standpoint of the empire it meant the beginning of an 
orderly policy. For the mixed population that thronged the val- 
leys of the Appalachians and was already conscious of common 
interests acquired as they won their lands, the proclamation line 
was a vexatious restriction. It was not to be respected or tolerated. 
Instead of constituting the final limit of promiscuous expansion of 
the frontier in America, the proclamation line is the starting-point 
for the winning of the West by a people already Americanized, and 
no longer either exclusively European or wholly provincial. East 
of the frontier of 1763 the American groups are best to be ex- 
amined as European frontiers in America; west of the line is an 
American frontier to be studied in contrast with the East.’ 

™The best available account of the French attempt to encircle the northern wing of 


the frontier is Louise P. Kellogg’s excellent French Régime in Wisconsin and the Northwest 
(1925). 


CHAPTER II 
THE FORKS OF THE OHIO 


Tue line of the most advanced settlements in 1763 reveals the 
western front not of a single column of frontier homeseekers, but 
of several. In the region south of Albany, New York, and north of 
Knoxville, Tennessee, the various forces were somewhat blended 
because of the unifying influence of the transverse mountain 
ranges. North and south of this region, the flanks of the frontier 
were checked in their advance by other causes.! 

The northernmost end of the frontier, behind the outlying settle- 
ments of New England and New York, began at the St. Croix 
River, which was already established as the eastern boundary of 
Maine. This stream, whose name was carried on the maps of the 
New England coast, though not in use among the actual residents, 
received its designation at the time of De Monts, founder of an 
unsuccessful colony in 1604 on an island off its mouth. Diffused 
along the coastline, west of this point, but never penetrating far 
inland, the settlements of Maine were devoted to the industries 
of fishing and the production of naval stores. In a governmental 
way they were attached to Massachusetts, but that government 
had experienced little difficulty in preventing them from pushing 
to the interior. It had more than once offered special inducements, 
in the form of relief from taxation, to frontiersmen who would 
police the border. The province of Maine had few agricultural 
attractions that could compete with those of the Connecticut val- 
ley and its neighborhood. 

The Connecticut River was the most eastern of the important 
routes of frontier advance. On both sides, across the colonies of 
Connecticut and Massachusetts, it spread a zone of clearings, and 
before 1763 its upper reaches were occupied by the overflowing 
population from the coast settlements. The conflicting territorial 
claims of Massachusetts and New York, as well as those of New 
Hampshire, kept the country of the upper Connecticut uncertain 
as to its land titles until well into the eighteenth century. The 


1 Ellen C. Semple, American History in its Geographical Conditions (1903), and A. P. 
Brigham, Geographical Influences on American History (1903), were pioneer works, and ure 
still of great value in the study of physiographic sectionalism. 





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THE FORKS OF THE OHIO 13 


administration of New Hampshire was detached from that of 
Massachusetts when Governor Benning Wentworth was com- 
missioned for the former province in 1741. In 1764 the claim to 
Vermont was decided by an Order in Council assigning to New 
York the country north of Massachusetts and west of the Connect- 
icut. But the ownership of the farm lands involved continued for 
many years a matter of concern for all settlers. 

The claim of New York to extend as far east as the Connecticut 
was based on ancient grants to the Duke of York, but it was prob- 
ably allowed in the region north of Massachusetts for the sound 
military reason that between the Connecticut River and the 
- western shores of Lake Champlain lay the southern end of the road 
from Canada. Repeatedly bands of French and Indians had de- 
scended upon the northern frontier along the route of the River 
Richelieu and Lake Champiain. In the war just closed when the 
boundaries were adjusted, there had been heavy fighting here. 
Massachusetts was in no position or disposition to defend this 
route. New York was better placed, and more responsive to in- 
fluence from England. The allotment of the Green Mountains to 
New York must be regarded as one of the acts taken in the im- 
perial readjustment that followed the Treaty of Paris. 

The frontier settlements in the New Hampshire grants, as the 
country west of the Connecticut was sometimes called, stopped 
short of the southern tip of Lake Champlain. The hills east of 
the Hudson had few inhabitants, and that river was a channel of 
settlement only as far north as Albany. The Mohawk from its 
mouth to near its source at Fort Stanwix was narrowly lined with 
German settlements. But the resistance of Indian tribes rather 
than difficulties of geography prevented extension west or south 
of that river. 

The great barricade at the northern end of the colonial frontier 
line was maintained by the Six Nations of Indians, or Iroquois. 
The Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, and Tuscarora 
formed a loose confederacy, with a strong hostility towards 
European intruders. In a triangle of country, indicated by Ni- 
agara below Lake Erie, Oswego on Lake Ontario, and Easton on 
the upper Delaware River, their control of the situation discour- 
aged either prospectors or settlers. Generally in alliance with the 
English, and backed up against a convenient line of communication 
in the Lakes and the St. Lawrence, they resisted encroachment 
until after 1763. Then, at Fort Stanwix, in 1768, they made a 


14 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


general peace and settlement. There had been occasional cross- 
ings from the Schoharie to the Susquehanna earlier in the century, 
but the full development of the upper Susquehanna in central 
New York was reserved for the period after the French had gone. 
From this northern frontier, and the country of the Six Nations, 
the Appalachian valleys extend southward to the Cherokee upon 
the southern flank. 

The mountain buttress, in which rise the sources of the Sa- 
vannah, Chattahoochee, Coosa, and Tennessee rivers, forms the 
southern shoulder of the Appalachians and the northern limit of 
the group of southern Indians. Five tribes, later to be generally 
known as the “‘five civilized tribes,’ ranged the plains beyond the 
- mountains and west to the Mississippi. On the eastern front were 
the Cherokee and the Creeks, with the Seminole projecting down 
into the wilderness of Florida. Westward, and along the Missis- 
sippi below the bluffs on which Memphis now stands, were the 
Chickasaw and the Choctaw. Of these the Cherokee had been 
long in residence, and were much affected by contact with the 
Gulf settlements of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola. Many 
traders had married Indian women and settled among them. 
Half-breed children had grown to be leaders of the tribes. More 
than the other Indians adjacent to the English colonies, the 
Cherokee had begun to abandon their wild habits and to reside in 
villages among their cultivated fields. Before they were finally 
displaced, they built churches and schools, reduced their language 
to a written form, and gave promise as to the possibility of civiliz- 
ing the Indians. The natural routes from the English seaboard 
settlements to the interior went around the southern tribes, rather 
than through them. These thus escaped the disintegrating influ- 
ences of contact with a farming frontier, and maintained their own 
identity for two generations after the close of the French and 
Indian War. 

By the Treaty of Hard Labour, in 1768, the Cherokee agreed 
to an eastern boundary line, adjacent to the British colonies, much 
as the Iroquois agreed to one at Fort Stanwix in the same year. 
There was a clear British policy to separate the colonized area 
from the Indian Country by a neutral strip, bounded on the east 
by the Proclamation Line, and on the west by a composite line 
based on Indian treaty provisions. From the head of the Savannah 
River, near Fort Prince George, to the head of the Mohawk near 
Fort Stanwix, the Indian Country took shape behind the barrier 


THE FORKS OF THE OHIO 15 


of the Appalachian system in the years after 1763. There was not 
much pressure from white population at either the northern or the 
southern end. But in the middle, where the main roads from the 
Atlantic came near to the chief valleys leading into the Mississippi, 
the Forks of the Ohio were already a main objective of the colonial 
thrust. 

The southern boundary of Pennsylvania, which is not wrongly 
described as the Keystone State, runs through the region of the 
best approaches to the junction of the Allegheny and Mononga- 
hela rivers, where the Ohio takes its rise. Here is the gateway to 
the Mississippi Valley. By way of either the Potomac or the 
Susquehanna, in this latitude, the settler easily advanced from 
tidewater to the foothills of the mountains. Each of these rivers 
cuts across the easternmost of the mountain valleys. Near the 
point in the Susquehanna where the Juniata enters it, and the 
point on the Potomac where it receives the Shenandoah, the tribu- 
taries of the streams tend to run with the mountain folds instead 
of across them. From central New York to southwest Virginia 
they open up the Appalachians. And it was an added advantage 
to their region as a route of entry that land titles between the 
Potomac and the Susquehanna were in confusion. The courageous 
squatter might with impunity defy the claims of both the Penns 
and the Calverts who were lords proprietors of the soil. 

The boundary controversy between William Penn and Lord 
Baltimore originated in the uncertainties of language in the char- 
ters of Maryland and Pennsylvania. The earlier grant, in 1632, 
cut away from Virginia for the benefit of Lord Baltimore, the 
wedge of land between the fortieth degree of north latitude and 
the south bank of the Potomac, as far west as the “‘first fountain”’ 
of that stream. Nearly fifty years thereafter, in 1681, a later king 
presented to William Penn a rough rectangle of territory, extend- 
ing five degrees of longitude west from the Delaware River, and 
from the “‘beginning of the fortieth degree of Northerne Latitude” 
to the beginning of the “‘three and fortieth.”” The inaccuracy of 
contemporary maps, and the confusion of words in the grants, 
made it possible for the Penns to claim that the “‘beginning of the 
fortieth degree” was in fact the thirty-ninth parallel, and that 
Pennsylvania had received from the crown one full degree of land 
formerly allowed to Maryland. Lord Baltimore naturally con- 
tested this reading of the charters, asserting a right to the fortieth 
parallel. Philadelphia, however, had been founded by Penn on the 


16 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Delaware about midway between the parallels of contest; and the - 
Quaker founder could not surrender his contention without losing 
his fair seat of government.? 

The inevitable result of the contest of jurisdiction was a dual 
assertion of ownership to the strip between the fortieth and thirty- 
ninth parallels, and repeated conflicts in the effort to exercise con- 
trol. The enterprising squatter, playing one claimant of quit-rents 
against the other, was often able to avoid both. Along the bound- 
ary line, and west of the Susquehanna to the source of the Poto- 
mac, the area began to fill up in the middle third of the eighteenth 
century. Beyond the Potomac, Virginia became Penn’s opponent 
in place of Maryland, for the ancient Virginia charter of 1609 could 
be construed as founding a claim to country well north of Pitts- 
burgh and the Ohio Forks. 

The adjustment of the Pennsylvania-Maryland boundary was — 
not reached until the French and Indian War was in progress. 
In 1760 the proprietors compromised on a line to be surveyed 
fifteen miles south of the latitude of Philadelphia; and in the next 
eight years the imported surveyors, Mason and Dixon, ran the 
boundary that has thenceforth borne their name. The controversy 
between Virginia and Pennsylvania was unimportant in 1768 
when the line was finished, since few settlers had reached the 
southwest corner of Pennsylvania. In the next few years, how- 
ever, there was what closely resembled a little civil war on this 
border. Pennsylvania reinforced its claim by creating in 1773 the 
county of Westmoreland, west of the Youghiogheny and north of 
the projection of the Mason and Dixon line. But Virginia had al- 
ready claimed that this was a part of its own Augusta County. 
Lord Dunmore, the Virginia governor, sent his agents to Pitts- 
burgh to give reality to his claim, but the outbreak of the Revo- 
Jution drove him from his post. In 1779 Pennsylvania and Vir- 
ginia at last accomplished what their royal and proprietary gover- 
nors had failed upon, and compromised upon the angle that now 
forms the southwestern boundary of the former State. 

The approach of the settled frontier to this disputed area began 
with the creation of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1729. 
English, Scotch-Irish, and German farmers were by this time pros- 
pecting beyond the Susquehanna, and the Germans were begin- 
ning to dig in along that river, in communities that have not even 


2 Winfred T. Root, The Relations of Pennsylvania with the British Government, 1696-1768 
(1912). 


THE FORKS OF THE OHIO 17 


yet been dissolved or broken up. As “Pennsylvania Dutch” some 
of them retained their identity and language, and made a striking 
exception to the general rule that along the frontier the marks of 
race were speedily blended in the common American type. Har- 
per’s Ferry and Harris’s Ferry, below the mouths of the Shenan- 
doah and Juniata respectively, were in use by this time. And 
Robert Harper, who opened the former in 1734, is claimed by the 
German-American historians as German, and by the Scotch-Irish 
as Scotch-Irish. He may indeed have been both without violating 
any of the probabilities of the frontier.* 

While most of the incomers were content to buy land rights and 
settle in the valleys, there moved among them men of older estab- 
lishment in the country who engaged in larger schemes of land 
speculation. In Virginia there was a boundary uncertainty similar 
to that along the Pennsylvania line. The grant to Lord Culpeper 
of the “‘northern neck”’ which was the peninsula lying between the 
Potomac and the Rappahannock rivers, detached this tract from 
the ownership and management of the Old Dominion. The north- 
ern limit of the tract depended upon agreement as to the sources 
of the two rivers concerned. In 1745 Lord Fairfax, into whose 
hands the northern neck had descended by inheritance, made his 
surveys and built the Fairfax Stone at what he declared to be the 
head of the Potomac. Beyond this point the way was clear for new 
speculations, and the young George Washington, his friend and 
employee, was already infected with the common virus of land 
desire. 

By royal charter of 1748, a group of Virginia and British men 
of affairs were incorporated as the Ohio Land Company, and were 
given a grant of 200,000 acres of land west of the Allegheny Moun- 
tains. Lawrence Washington, elder brother of George, was one of 
their number; and Christopher Gist, who was known along the 
Virginia border as surveyor and prospector, was sent out as their 
advance representative. As far as the mouth of Will’s Creek, on 
the Potomac near its northernmost bend, the river and the settled 
trails were convenient guides to Gist’s party. He built a stockade 
at Will’s Creek that was named Fort Cumberland, in honor of the 
British duke whose exploits in the recent war had thrilled the souls 
of loyal subjects. Fort Cumberland was erected in 1750, and in 


8C. A. Hanna, The Wilderness Trail (1911), and The Scotch-Irish, or the Scot in North 
Britain, North Ireland, and North America (1902), trace the advance of the frontier towards 
the Ohio, with much learning and no more controversy than is general in racial histories. 


18 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the few years ensuing the Virginia speculators pushed out from it 
towards the Forks of the Ohio where their enterprise inspired 
counteraction by the French. 

The breathing stages in the century of French wars were reached 
in the treaties of Ryswick (1697), Utrecht (1713), Aix-la-Cha- 
pelle (1748), and Paris (1763). After Utrecht there was a cession 
of Acadia to the British, although France soon regretted and tried 
to retrieve the loss. After Aix-la-Chapelle the status quo ante 
bellum was promised to be restored, and the great French fortress 
at Louisburg that the New England troops had seized was given 
back. But the approach of the Ohio Land Company towards the 
Ohio River, where the French had hitherto held uncontested sway, 
brought forth positive assertions of French ownership from 
Canada. An expedition was sent southwest from Montreal under 
one Céloron de Bienville in 1749. Leaving the St. Lawrence route 
at Niagara, Céloron cut across New York to the Allegheny River, 
and buried near its head, on July 29, 1749, a lead plate claiming 
the country for his master the king of France. As he traveled down 
the Allegheny River and the Ohio, Céloron continued to plant his 
plates and raise the arms of France. He descended the Ohio to a 
point below the mouth of the Miami, the future site of Cincinnati 
and beyond the region of immediate danger from the English, and 
then returned to Canada. The relative effectiveness of buried 
tablets and cabins set in frontier clearings as a means of determin- 
ing ownership was now to be worked out. 

A French fort, Duquesne by name, in the angle between the 
Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, was erected to challenge the 
power of the Virginia speculators to realize upon their Ohio Land 
Company grant. The youthful mission of Washington‘ to demand 
the surrender and abandonment of this post is the prelude to his - 
public life, and marks an opening gesture of the French and Indian 
War that broke over the border somewhat before its European 
counterpart, the Seven Years’ War, became a reality. In 1754 the 
colonial delegates gathered at Albany to discuss plans for common 
defense and imperial union. The following year the decisive con- 
test broke out. 

In the struggle in America in this final war for control, the na- 
ture of the effort of each of the contestants indicates its resources 
as an imperial power. The French, whose policy had been to leave 
the Indians alone and to exploit their trade, operated with de- 

* Archer B. Hulbert, Washington and the West (1905). 


THE FORKS OF THE OHIO 19 


tached expeditions, supplemented by bands of savages. The Brit- 
ish, on the other hand, made the regular troops only the nucleus 
of the effort, and attached to them large bodies of volunteers and 
militia, and found it possible to derive supplies and transport from 
the settled counties that were fast approaching the scene of actual 
hostilities. When a French force retired from the field, it left an 
empty country. When a British force retired, it marched back 
through a zone of farmsteads, that had been growing while the 
column advanced. Many of the militia that formed the army kept 
their eyes open in the new country, picked out advantageous sites, 
and hurried home to hurry back with their families, and extend 
the frontier zone, French or no French. 

Washington failed in 1754 to induce the French to abandon Fort 
Duquesne, and was himself taken prisoner at Fort Necessity. 
When this news reached the seaboard and crossed to England, a 
great expedition was prepared to move against the fort in 1755. 
An army under Braddock was dispatched to the Chesapeake, and 
disembarked at Alexandria, Virginia. ‘Thence they moved up the 
Potomac to Fort Cumberland, and beyond that point into the 
wilderness. In a general way Braddock’s march followed the trail 
that Christopher Gist blazed for the Ohio Company, but Braddock 
cut away the underbrush and removed some of the standing timber 
so that the army wagons and artillery could move westward with 
his force. In June, 1755, Braddock was advancing with some 
twenty-two hundred men from Fort Cumberland to the Forks of 
the Ohio. If he had known how to use the knowledge of Indian 
fighting that George Washington and the colonial troops pos- 
sessed, he might have avoided disaster. As it was, he was surprised 
and destroyed on July 9, on a field upon the right bank of the 
Monongahela somewhat below the mouth of the Youghiogheny, 
and about seven miles above Fort Duquesne. The militia con- 
voyed back to safety what there remained of his defeated troops. 

There was Indian war along the whole French border after the 
failure of Braddock, for fear of retaliation, the one thing that held 
the apprehensive Indian in check, was now dispelled. And it was 
three years before the next British force was ready to bring peace 
to the settlers of the border and disaster to the French. William 
Johnson had meanwhile commanded at the victory at Lake George 
(1755), but had been forced back to Fort Edward on the Hudson. 
In 1758 England prepared the largest forces that had been sent to 
America, intending to move simultaneously against Louisburg and 


20 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


on to Quebec, against the forts around Lake George, against the — 
French at Niagara, and against Fort Duquesne. The last expedi- 
tion was put in charge of Brigadier John Forbes, who completed 
his organization at Philadelphia, and moved west along the roads 
of Pennsylvania to a mobilizing point across the Susquehanna. 

The first military decision of Forbes was whether to follow the 
trail that Braddock had blazed in 1755, which involved a short 
detour to the south, or to cut his own way through Pennsylvania 
to his destination. His Virginia aids urged the advantage of their 
route, but he determined to cut a second road to the Ohio. With 
the commander generally sick and at the rear, his army of over 
seven thousand men crossed the Susquehanna at Harris’s Ferry, 
passed through Carlisle and the site of Bedford, and was by No- 
vember, 1758, approaching the place of Braddock’s defeat. The 
army of Forbes escaped the efforts of the French to ambush or 
destroy them, and left in their rear another route for the farmers 
who were behind them. The French at Fort Duquesne did not 
wait for the inevitable. As Forbes approached they destroyed their 
supplies, burned their buildings, and departed for Canada, aban- 
doning the valley of the Ohio to the British. The other campaigns, 
that drove them from Niagara and reduced Quebec, followed in 
the next few months. In 1760 the military conquest of Canada was 
complete. 

The poetic license of Dr. Holmes has perpetuated the memory 
of that year, 1755, when ‘‘Braddock’s army was done so brown,” 
and the American historian has generally interpreted this defeat 
as evidence of the ineffectiveness of British regulars in the wilder- 
ness. They were indeed ineffective. But they were also there; and 
maintained by their artillery and trains. More correctly than by 
Dr. Holmes, the event has recently been explained by Archer 
Butler Hulbert,® who calls it Braddock’s victory; for it was the 
ability of the British to make a road across the country from the 
Potomac to the Ohio, and to make a second three years later, that 
really won the Ohio country. In the contest of the two civiliza- 
tions, the French were outweighed by the numbers and habits of 
the British. And in the rear of the British armies of frontier de- 
fense there poured an unbroken stream of homeseekers, with 


* The sixteen small, thin, and valuable volumes of this writer, comprised in his Historie 
Highways (1903), cover the historical geography of most of the migrations east of the 
Mississippi. He is also responsible for The Ohio River. A Course of Empire (1906), and The 
Niagara River (1908), 


THE FORKS OF THE OHIO 21 


Scotch-Irish leaders at the front, to hold the lands. The survey 
of Mason and Dixon’s line (1760-1768) followed the military vic- 
tories of the war. The struggle for the farms of southwest Penn- 
sylvania began at once. And the colonials who believed that they 
had won the war felt deep indignation and sense of keen injustice 
when the immediate result of their victory was the proclamation 
of 1763, and the prohibition to extend their settlements beyond 
the headwaters of the streams flowing into the Atlantic. They had 
reached the Youghiogheny and the Monongahela. Pittsburgh was 
already named at the Forks of the Ohio, and they could not retreat. 


CHAPTER III 
THE SHENANDOAH COUNTRY AND THE TENNESSEE 


Tue full intention of the British Government (if indeed it had a 
real intention), when it proscribed the occupation of the West 
beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic, is not 
yet known. There was at least a new feeling of imperial responsi- 
bility, and a hope to make the colonies more fruitful. In 1768, for 
the first time, one of His Majesty’s principal secretaries of state 
was made Secretary of State for the Colonies, and the share of the 
Board of Trade in colonial government was somewhat lessened. 
It was the opinion of Washington, whose hopes may have shaped 
his judgment, that the proclamation was only “‘a temporary ex- 
pedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,” and one sure to be 
abandoned “‘when those Indians consent to our occupying the 
lands.” In the treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labour, the 
Royal Government accepted cessions of land from the tribes in the 
country beyond the line, and neither then nor later did it refuse to 
listen to colonial overtures for the erection of additional provincial 
establishments in the West. 

The history of these projected colonies, the creation of any one 
of which might have changed the course of American development, 
throws light upon the lust for lands with which many Americans 
were inspired.! The possibility of their creation for barrier pur- 
poses was discussed by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Pownall, 
both of whom were members of the Albany Congress of 1754. In 
the following year, Samuel Hazard of Philadelphia aspired to form 
a colony abreast of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Carolina, and run- 
ning from one hundred miles west of Pennsylvania to the Missis- 
sipp1, and even beyond it. “Charlotiana,”’ to embrace the triangle 
between the Wabash, the Mississippi, and the Upper Lakes, was 
discussed at about the same time. The proclamation did not stop 
the hopeful speculation, and two schemes known by the names of 
Illinois and Vandalia were under consideration until the Revolu- 


4¥. J. Turner, “Western State Making in the Revolutionary Era,” in American His- 
torical Review, vol. 1; G. H. Alden, “‘New Governments west of the Alleghanies before 
1780,”’ in University of Wisconsin Bulletin (Historical Series, vol. 11), and ‘‘The State of 
Franklin,” in American Historical Review, vol. vit. 


SHENANDOAH COUNTRY AND THE TENNESSEE 23 


tion checked their course. These had the support in England of 
Dr. Franklin who was there as colonial agent, and in the colonies 
of William Johnson, now Sir William and superntendent of Indian 
affairs because of his military services.2, From 1767 to 1772 the 
various branches of the British Government were pondering 
whether a petition supported by colonial magnates of such emi- 
nence ought to be rejected, and in August of the latter year the 
Board of Trade was directed to go ahead with the details. The 
proposed boundaries for Vandalia fix its location southwest of 
Pennsylvania, with the Ohio at its north, an irregular mountain 
line between the Fairfax Stone and Cumberland Gap on its south, 
and the Kentucky River on its west. The transaction went so far 
that the governor of Virginia was warned not to grant lands in 
trespass upon the proposed colony, a warning that could not have 
been needed had the Proclamation of 1763 been vigorously in 
effect. Independence came before the new charter was issued, 
leaving Virginia still able to claim the full extent of her own charter 
boundaries. 

While the speculators were thinking in terms of huge provincial 
grants, the frontier farmers continued steadily at their task of 
clearing farms. From southwest Pennsylvania they advanced up 
the Shenandoah and its parallel neighbors into the valley country 
beyond the Blue Ridge. For half a century after the initial settle- 
ments at Harris’s Ferry and Harper’s Ferry the overflow from Vir- 
ginia and Pennsylvania, strongly reinforced by immigrant home- 
seekers, sought out new locations behind the counties of the low- 
land region. About ninety miles southwest of Harper’s Ferry, 
another gap through the Blue Ridge let in a secondary stream of 
men who had crossed Virginia along the line of the James River. 
The organization of Frederick County, with Winchester as its 
seat, occurred in 1743. Staunton, the seat of Augusta, held its 
first court in 1745. And in 1749 Virginia and North Carolina found 
it profitable to extend their common boundary westward until it 
reached the Laurel Fork of the Holston. 

The Cumberland Mountains form to-day a part of the boundary 
of Kentucky and Virginia. On either slope their streams drain not 
into the Potomac basin, but the other way, into the Mississippi. 
On the west, the Cumberland River here starts its way across Ken- 


2 The State historian of New York, Dr. James Sullivan, has recently edited three fine 
volumes of The Papers of Sir William Johnson (1921), which are particularly rich for the 
years 1745 to 1774. 


24 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


tucky to its entrance into the lower Ohio. East of the Cumberland 
Mountains are the upper tributaries of the Tennessee River, of 
which the Clinch and Holston are the most imposing. Between 
the tributaries of the Potomac, flowing northward, and those of the 
Tennessee and Cumberland flowing southward there is no pro- 
nounced watershed to obstruct the course of frontier advance. 
Easily the pioneers passed along the parallel valley trails, with 
minor trails entering from east of the Blue Ridge, and with cor- 
responding ways opening west, where the New River cuts across 
to a junction with the Great Kanawha, or where the Cumberland 
Mountains are broken by Cumberland Gap (which is where the 
southern boundary of Virginia crosses them). As a military meas- 
ure the Virginia troops crossed the low watershed in 1756, and 
descended the Holston to a point some twenty-five miles below the 
present site of Knoxville, where they built Fort Loudoun. For the 
same reasons Fort Prince George on the Savannah, near its head, 
was constructed in the same year. The settlements were well in 
the rear of these outposts when they were planted, and Fort Lou- 
doun could not be held with the troops available. But with the 
return of peace, the military trails became the roads of entry for 
the people.’ 

Virginians dominated in this expansion of settlement, as was 
natural because of their situation, but it is impossible to overlook 
the North Carolinians who joined the march after it came abreast 
of their own colony. The great difference between the relation of 
North Carolina to the mountain colonies, and that of Virginia, is 
that the settlements of North Carolina had not ascended the east- 
ern slopes of the mountains. In Virginia by 1760 the seaboard 
plantations merged gradually into those of the up-country, and 
these in turn were continuous up to the Blue Ridge. In North 
Carolina there was a broad expanse of unoccupied land between 
the main colony and the tributaries of the Tennessee River. 

The development of county government in Virginia and North 
Carolina kept uneven pace with the need for it among the border 
settlements. Heretofore there had often been a lapse of several 
years after the legal creation of a county before its first officers 
qualified. Now there were frequently many settlers and a need to 


3 This is the theme of Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (1889-96), romanti- 
cally written, with emphasis upon the heroic virtues. Archibald Henderson, Conquest of the 
Old Southwest (1920), traverses much of the same ground, helped by the mass of mono- 
graphic literature that has appeared since Roosevelt wrote, and inspired by family en- 
thusiasm and a real literary zest. 


SHENANDOAH COUNTRY AND THE TENNESSEE 25 


register land titles and probate estates before the colonial legisla- 
tures became aware of the fact. Wherever it happened that a 
group of settlers outran the operation of established law there was 
a tendency for them to frame some kind of legal institutions for 
themselves. They were never embarrassed by isolation, though 
sometimes exasperated by apparent neglect. The Pilgrim group 
on the Mayflower in 1620 set a precedent that their successors fol- 
lowed in unnumbered cases. Along the southern borders of the 
Virginia-Carolina valleys there were four clearly defined experi- 
ments of this sort in the fifteen years after the treaties of Fort 
Stanwix and Hard Labour. In their earlier phases they seem to 
represent a protest against colonial or imperial attempts to restrict 
their spread; later they are merged in the aftermath of the Ameri- 
can Revolution. 

The Watauga settlement was made about 1769, and gave rise 
_ to an early exhibition of the frontier aptitude for self-government. 

It began in the normal expansion from what is now the south- 
west corner of Virginia into what has become the northeast corner 
of ‘Tennessee. The Watauga River is an eastern tributary of the 
Holston, making a junction with the latter a little south of the 
Virginia line. In the absence of surveys, the settlers picked the 
choice locations for themselves before they learned that they were 
encroaching upon the lands of North Carolina. They claimed their 
title under the Virginia cabin right, by which one cabin and an 
acre of corn gave foundation for a claim to four hundred acres. In 
1771 and 1772 the settlement grew in size because of the entry of 
a rebellious group of North Carolina colonists who had been on the 
losing side at the battle of the Alamance. 

The factions in North Carolina politics that produced this in- 
surrection, with its culminating conflict on May 16, 1771, show a 
social cleavage. Similar classes prevailed in nearly every other 
colony, and tended sharply to divide the people according to their 
property interests. The first made counties in a colony gained 
representation in the assembly, and used their votes to prevent 
the extension of representation after the growth of the commu- 
nity made additional counties inevitable. There was everywhere 

4 John S. Bassett, “The Regulators of North Carolina,”’ in American Historical Associa- 
tion, Annual Report, 1894; C. H. Lincoln, The Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania 
(1901); William A. Schaper, ‘‘Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina,”’ in 
American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1900; Charles H. Ambler, Sectionalism in 


Virginia from 1776 to 1861 (1910); are among the most useful studies of this social section- 
alism. 


26 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


irregular and discriminating representation; but rarely was it as. 
pronounced as in North Carolina where the original counties clung 
to their five assemblymen, allowing the new counties only two. 
The resentment against this injustice was increased by questions 
of land ownership. The strip of territory along the Virginia line 
belonged to Earl Granville who was loath to grant land titles, but 
preferred a quit-rent. The taxes levied by the province, when 
added to the claims of Granville, made a burden heavier than the 
frontiersmen were willing to carry. The injustice was aggravated 
by a loose method of accounting, and a wasteful fee system that 
made it possible for the sheriffs to abuse their position to their pri- 
vate profit. The remoteness of the courts, and the cost of attend- 
ing them, gave additional grievance. The result was mob violence 
— a real peasants’ revolt — in which the regulators tried to im- 
prove their situation by force. In retaliation the provincial govern- 
ment took punitive measures against the frontiersmen that cul- 
minated in the pitched and disastrous battle of the Alamance. 
The “‘regulation”’ was ended in blood and the leaders of the regu- 
lators were hanged. Many of their followers left North Carolina in 
indignation, and shifted to the Watauga district, only to find that 
here too they were under the jurisdiction of the native colony. 

The participants in the movement into new lands were gener- 
ally unimportant men, whose very names can be determined only 
after a more careful search of title deeds and recorded wills than 
any historian has yet made. Often only partly literate, or worse, 
they left few formal records of their life, and their monument in 
tilled fields tells nothing of their personality except as it reveals 
their stubborn industry. In the Watauga, however, two men 
stand forth whose names personify the movement in which they 
led. James Robertson, whose origin appears to have been Scotch, 
was under thirty years of age when he took the lead in the group. 
Born in Virginia, in Brunswick County in 1742, he drifted south 
into North Carolina when Raleigh was still unfounded, and Wake 
County, in which it now exists, was an active frontier. The rough- 
and-tumble of border existence here is suggested by the fact that 
within two years of its creation the court of Wake County had to 
do justice twice in the case of ears bitten off in personal encounters. 
Here too was a center of the violence of the regulators, although 
Robertson left the community before the battle of the Alamance. 
In the Watauga region he was a natural leader, with a fame little 
dimmed by that of his great associate, John Sevier. 


SHENANDOAH COUNTRY AND THE TENNESSEE 27 


The Huguenot ancestry of John Sevier may have contributed to 
the making of his character, but more is due to the frontier of the 
Shenandoah Valley, where he was born in 1745.5 His biographer 
describes him as the son of a Virginian, who was a “considerable 
planter.” He was better educated than most of the men he worked 
with, but resembled them in early marriage and speculative zeal. 
At seventeen he took him a wife, and laid out and named the town- 
ship of Newmarket, Virginia. He knew the Indians, and how to 
trade with them as well as fight them, before he moved to join the 
colony of Robertson on the Watauga in 1772. Year after year this 
settlement remained isolated and in danger. Under its leaders it 
blocked the trail of the Cherokee against the settlements of both 
Carolina and Virginia, and “‘stood, from first to last, the immov- 
able rear-guard of the Revolution.” In 1772, tradition has it, the 
Watauga group formed a written “association” in which they 
agreed to stand together, as indeed they must; and in which they 
provided for the minimum institutions of government which 
neither Virginia could nor North Carolina would establish. The 
text of this agreement is not known, but the evidence as to its ex- 
istence seems to be conclusive. Certainly the bond of existence and 
agreement was alive, whether on paper or not. 

Out of the Watauga settlement there germinated similar groups 
of pioneers who risked the wilderness in their determination to live 
their own life and to advantage themselves as best they could. In 
1775 Judge Richard Henderson found here recruits for one of the 
most spectacular of border enterprises. In 1779 James Robertson 
led an emigration hence to the Cumberland. In 1784 under John 
Sevier there was formed the short-lived but significant State of 
Franklin. 

The Transylvania speculation of Richard Henderson is con- 
nected both with the movement for new colonies after the Treaty 
of Fort Stanwix, and with the advancing occupation of the Vir- 
ginia- Tennessee valleys. ‘The permanency of the adjustment made 
by the Proclamation of 1763 had already been brought into doubt 
many times before the settlement at Watauga was planted, to 
overrun the line. In 1768 the British acquired the claim of the Six 
Nations to an indefinite tract south of the Ohio River, which ap- 
peared to be a step preliminary to a new opening of lands. In 1774 
the province of Quebec was swung south from the trail to Lake 
Nipissing to the line of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The east- 

§ J. R. Gilmore, John Sevier as a Commonwealth Builder (1887). 


28 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ern colonies felt that this was both a new colonial venture and a 
threat at their peace and safety. In the same year Lord Dunmore, 
the Virginia royal governor, concluded a warfare on the Ohio River 
below Pittsburgh, that brought the area of West Virginia under 
his control. 

Lord Dunmore’s War was a result of continued encroachment 
of white settlement in spite of the treaties with the southern In- 
dians.® A trail had been cut across from the Monongahela through 
the bustling southwest corner of Pennsylvania, to the Ohio River, 
which was reached at the mouth of Wheeling Creek. The island in 
the Ohio River here made a convenient place for a settlement and 
a post, and the brothers Zane, whose initiative brought about the 
establishment, were followed by others whose cabins crept down 
the left bank of the Ohio. The Indians were irritated by this 
crowding process, and, maddened by the whiskey that they could 
get from the settlements, made attacks upon isolated homes. At 
this moment Lord Dunmore was making a vigorous assertion of 
Virginia title to Pennsylvania lands, and had an agent named 
Connolley in actual possession of Pittsburgh. He took the ag- 
gressive against the Shawnee tribe in the country below Wheeling, 
and defeated Cornstalk with his Shawnee braves on a field known 
as Point Pleasant, at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. The un- 
questioned jurisdiction of his province was by this campaign ex- 
tended over most of West Virginia. Among the men who fought 
for him at Point Pleasant were many who left their homes on the 
Watauga or the New, or in the Shenandoah Valley. Isaac Shelby 
was there, and William Cocke, as well as Daniel Boone who was 
on the verge of a much greater venture in the valley of the Ken- 
tucky River. , 

Throughout its relations with the various Indian tribes the Brit- 
ish Government sought to maintain the general principle of law 
that title to Indian land could be acquired only by public author- 
ity. The desire to speculate in such land repeatedly induced colo- 
nial subjects to negotiate directly with the Indians, who were 
easily influenced by their friends, and who responded readily to 
the offer of presents, food, and drink. But the royal governors 

§ The Draper Manuscripts of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin contain the most 
important single collection of sources for this time and place. From them came the papers 
that Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg edited as Documentary History af 
Lord Dunmore’s War, 1774 (1905), The Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 1775-1777 (1908), 


Frontier Defense on the Upper Ohio (1912); and that Dr. Kellogg edited alone, Frontier 
Advance on the Upper Ohio (1916), and Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio (1917). 


SHENANDOAH COUNTRY AND THE TENNESSEE 29 


discouraged and disavowed such agreements, while in the proprie- 
taries such land was a legitimate monopoly of the proprietor him- 
self. This was the subsequent view of the United States Govern- 
ment, that “‘deeds obtained by private persons from the Indians 
without any antecedent authority, or subsequent confirmation, 
from the Government, could not vest in the grantees mentioned in 
such deeds a title to the lands therein described.”’ The few excep- 
tions to this law were not enough to warrant a hope, but created 
only a speculative chance that such transactions might be legiti- 
mated. Such a chance Judge Richard Henderson took when he 
negotiated a treaty with the Indians of the Kentucky country in 
March, 1775. 

James Robertson, of Watauga, and Daniel Boone, were among 
the border leaders associated with Henderson in the attempt to 
found a great land company to operate west of Virginia. They 
negotiated a private treaty at Sycamore Shoals, that is reported 
to have been clearly and honestly explained to the Indians who 
signed it. The land described, to which Henderson sought title, 
was the area between the southern watershed of the Cumberland 
River (separating it from the Tennessee), and the Ohio River. 
To-day it represents most of Kentucky and much of middle Ten- 
nessee. According to his own notion, Henderson was within his 
rights in going through the forms of the purchase, although Vir- 
ginia disavowed it at once. The dissolving authority of England 
could not be invoked against him. The Transylvania Company 
was organized to exploit the lands, and Daniel Boone, most famous 
of all the scouts, was hired to mark a road from the settlements 
into the Kentucky Valley and the Blue Grass region. 

Boone had already hunted over the land transferred at Syca- 
more Shoals, and knew that the easiest road ran down the east 
side of the Cumberland Mountain, turning sharply northwest at 
its tip to go through Cumberland Gap. He blazed the Wilderness 
Trail along this path immediately after the treaty, and in April, 
1775, was building himself a cabin at Boonesborough, by a salt 
lick on the south side of the Kentucky River. From Watauga to 
the new settlements appearing at Harrodsburg and Lexington, his 
trail was soon beaten by the feet of hundreds of immediate follow- 
ers; while the name of Lexington commemorates the doings in New 
England at the moment when Henderson joined Boone at ‘he 
stockade on the Kentucky River. James Harrod was already in 
Kentucky, with a station of his own, when Boone arrived to serve 


30 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


notice that this land had been bought by Judge Henderson from 
the Cherokee. As early as May 23, 1775, the Transylvania settlers 
held a local convention to make preliminary laws for themselves, 
in spite of the denial by Virginia of their right to exist. But when 
Henderson and the Transylvania Company sought to fix a price 
for their land many of the settlers shifted their allegiance to Vir- 
ginia. The Continental Congress, now in session, knew better than 
to offend Virginia by recognizing Transylvania as a separate state; 
and before the end of 1776 Virginia caught up with the develop- 
ment of its frontier, creating Kentucky County with the same 
dimensions that Kentucky has to-day. 

The Transylvania Company was not able to maintain its claim 
to the legality of the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals against the au- 
thority of Virginia and the indifference of Congress. Henderson 
was eventually compensated for his loss of the tract by grants in 
the Cumberland Valley, made by both Virginia and North Caro- 
lina, and retained his colonizing zest in spite of his misfortune. 
In 1780 he and James Robertson were at it again, this time in 
western North Carolina, where they founded Nashborough, or 
Nashville, in the bend of the Cumberland River. 

This settlement in middle Tennessee was not the result of single 
family pioneering, but was another of the group movements in 
which a large land speculation was united to the desire for inde- 
pendence and autonomy. On May 13, 1780, the Cumberland 
agreement was signed by two hundred and fifty settlers, and in- 
cluded a basis of government as well as a contract with what re- 
mained of the Transylvania Company. With this venture Robert- 
son separated himself from the colony at Watauga, which he had 
helped to found ten years before, and which had begun to throw 
its feelers along the other tributaries of the Tennessee — the 
Clinch and the Holston. Richard Henderson headed the list of 
signers of the Cumberland agreement, and drafted the document. 
Colonel John Donelson of Virginia was with the first detachment. 
The uncertainty whether Nashville was in Virginia or North Caro- 
lina was eventually settled after Robertson represented Cumber- 
land in the North Carolina Assembly and that body created David- 
son County for the government of the new group in 1783. 

The American Revolution was running its uneven course between 
the founding of the Watauga settlement and that of Nashville. 
The names of the heroes of the eastern conflict found their way to 
places on the western map. Washington, Sullivan, and Greene 


SHENANDOAH COUNTRY AND THE TENNESSEE 31 


counties, North Carolina, were spread over the mountain regions. 
But the spirit of equal representation that inspired the States in 
their demands upon Great Britain was stifled when it came to the 
recognition of their own new offshoots. In North Carolina twenty- 
eight of the thirty-five counties were still east of Raleigh when that 
State revised its constitution in 1835. And since the legislature was 
based upon county representation, the people in the large and few 
counties of the West were systematically outvoted by the more 
compact groups of the East. The fact that property and safety 
went with eastern compactness, and that on the border was debt 
and Indian danger, kept a sharp cleavage alive in North Carolina 
politics, as it did under similar conditions in the States further 
north and south. Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New York, and 
Massachusetts had much the same sectionalism, with the same 
causes and consequences. 

The settlers on the Watauga and the Holston came there largely 
from Virginia, but held the State of North Carolina responsible 
for what they lacked in facilities of government. When Congress 
in 1780 made an appeal to the States to surrender to it all the 
unused western lands, they looked to that body for recognition of 
their existence. When North Carolina ceded its western claim in 
1784, and Congress made no motion to accept or govern, the citi- 
zens of the Tennessee Valley followed the dictate of their history 
and character, and organized for themselves not a mere association 
but the State of Franklin. 

John Sevier was the inspiration of the State of Franklin. Now 
at the crest of his life, his success and courage made him natural 
leader of his community. The Indians feared and respected him 
in equal degree. His tactics of defending a frontier by carrying an 
aggressive war against the Indian villages, commended itself to his 
admirers and gave him weight with the savages. In August, 1784, 
he presided over a convention of delegates from Washington, Sulli- 
van, and Greene counties in the ceded part of North Carolina; 
and he became head of a provisional government which was a year 
later made as regular as the citizens of Franklin could make it. 
Congress ignored the overtures of Franklin for admission, as it 
ignored those of Transylvania. To its fears of alienating the parent 
States was now added the decrepitude that grew as the Confedera- 
tion decayed. A reaction from the zeal for independence in Frank- 
lin came when the tax-gatherers went round, and after 1786 North 
Carolina was successful in reasserting its control. Sevier was out- 


32 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


lawed as a traitor first, then pardoned and honored as the hero 
that he had become. The autonomous spirit of the frontier, and 
its disposition to penetrate the Indian Country, had however 
spread something of American institutions over the Shenandoah 
country and through the southwest gateway of the valleys into 
central Kentucky, and middle and eastern Tennessee. ‘lhe move- 
ment began as England sought to check it in 1763. In another 
twenty years it was become the conscious agent of a new sort of 
imperial expansion. The American Revolution gave it legitimacy, 
and it gave to America its meaning. 


CHAPTER IV 
THE REAR OF THE REVOLUTION 


THE contrast between the old England and the new Englands that 
developed in America before 1763 was obscured by the fact that 
one language in general served the needs of both nations. On 
neither side of the Atlantic was there clear realization of the crea- 
tion of anew nationality. So long as England refrained from ruling 
her English-speaking subjects the recognition of the difference was 
deferred. When she tried to reorganize and systematize the em- 
pire after the Seven Years’ War she stumbled upon obstacles that 
startled and grieved the leaders of opinion on both sides; but even 
then America knew its separate nationality long before England 
could bring herself to see it. Of all the frontier struggles that the 
American historian has to deal with, the first and greatest is this 
one, in which the overseas frontier cf Britain carried to its logical 
completion the development of local self-governing institutions, 
and then defended its independence through seven years of war. 
In this revolution the frontier bore its full part. In the ensuing war 
that secured independence, most of the heavy fighting was along 
the seaboard, but the lesser engagements of the interior border 
reveal the personality and resources of the frontiersmen, and 
count heavily in the further pressure against the unoccupied 
West.! 

The half-century after the creation of the Ohio Land Company 
in 1748 is one of continuous growth along the border, in spite of 
French wars, British policy, and revolution. It divides easily into 
three periods with tolerably clear limits. The first decade, ending 
with the capture of the site of Pittsburgh by the army of Forbes, 
is marked chiefly by the approach of the settled area to the valleys 
of the Appalachians and the outlets on the west. The second 
stage is one of conquest and covers the early years of the Revolu- 
tion, until George Rogers Clark found himself in possession of 

1 Channing’s theory of the Revolution is laid down in his vol. m1. Since the publication 
of Sydney George Fisher, True History of the American Revolution (1902), many of the 
younger historians have felt it necessary to give their interpretation of these events, among 
the more notable being Claude H. Van Tyne, The Causes of the War of Independence (1922), 


James T. Adams, Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776 (1923), and Arthur M. Schlesinger, 
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (1918). 


34 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Vincennes and the Illinois country in 1778-1779. The valleys were - 
occupied in these years, the wilderness was subdued both single- 
handed and by group effort, and before the later date was reached, 
conquest had given place to peaceful occupation in many parts. 
The period of occupation comes third in the series, but overlaps 
that of conquest. It may be said to begin about 1770 when the 
Watauga pioneers made their lodgment. There was no let-up in 
occupation thereafter. Before the end of the century the persist- 
ent attempts to make new states west of the mountains reached 
success. The governments that blocked them were displaced, and 
the new republic took to itself as equals both Kentucky and Ten- 
nessee. The Revolution on the border played a part in both of the 
later periods. 

The history of the old French wars repeated itself when England 
undertook to bring her rebellious colonists to terms and to undo 
the Revolution. On the seaboard, of course, every port lay open 
to any fleet that might invest it. But along the border the routes 
that the French had known were all that the English could find or 
use. The Lake Champlain route regained its importance imme- 
diately on the outbreak of hostilities. At either end of Lake On- 
tario an entry was sought to central New York. The Allegheny 
River continued to run an easy approach from Lake Erie to Pitts- 
burgh. And the Indians found themselves courted once more, by 
emissaries from either side, with promises that neither side was 
able to fulfill. The English military posts in Florida proved to be 
unimportant, because of the vast distances against the current of 
the Gulf rivers before any colonial habitations could be reached. 
When the British wished to strike against the southern border, the 
penetration was made at Charleston, and an inland march through 
South Carolina led them to the back country. 

The struggle for Quebec, which might have been the fourteenth 
colony had Benedict Arnold been successful, has been described in 
picturesque detail by Justin H. Smith.? It served only to reveal to 
Americans the fact that the French habitants of Canada were not 
the stuff for either martyrs or revolutionists, and that the cry of 
liberty and free government raised an echo only where generations 
of English past had educated the subject to an appreciation of 
them. The counterstroke of England from the St. Lawrence to 
the Hudson by the way of Lake Champlain gave the basis for the 
strategy of 1777, in which it was hoped to cut the New England 

2 Qur Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony — Canada and the American Revolution (1907) 


THE REAR OF THE REVOLUTION 35 


States away from the Middle Colonies. Three columns were desig- 
nated to (1) ascend the Hudson to Albany, (2) descend the Mo- 
hawk from Fort Stanwix to its mouth, and (3) join these two by 
the direct route from Montreal. The concerted movement was 
broken down. At Oriskany, near the site of Fort Stanwix, the in- 
vading force of General St. Leger was checked on August 6, 1777, 
by a patriot army under Nicholas Herkimer, a descendant of one 
of those immigrants whose name had clung to German Flats. The 
hope of uniting the Six Nations and inspiring the morale of the 
Tory population of central New York, evaporated with this rebuff. 
On August 16 the Hessians of General Burgoyne were routed at 
Bennington “at the foot of the Green Mountains” by a militia 
force from New England, while his major army was entangled in 
the wilderness between Lake George and the Hudson. Sir William 
Howe, meanwhile, instead of ascending the Hudson to codperate 
with Burgoyne, set sail for the Chesapeake, and was at Elkton 
when he ought to have been at Albany. The victory he gained 
when he occupied the rebel capital at Philadelphia in September 
was a costly compensation for the disastrous defeat of Burgoyne 
at Saratoga, or for the surrender of the northern army to the 
Americans on October 17, 1777. 

In the early years of the Revolution, the border between the 
Mohawk and the Tennessee was without formal protection, bus- 
tling though it was with new families. The refusal of the crown to 
authorize these to extend themselves, or to organize new colonies, 
was a grievance that kept them sore. The soreness turned to anger 
when Quebec was enlarged on the eve of the Revolution. To Que- 
bee and Montreal, which were hitherto centers of Canadian influ- 
ence, Detroit was now added as the western post in the enlarged 
province. Recent historians have proved that the Quebec Act of 
1774, that worked this change, was not intended as a stroke 
against the English-speaking colonies, or as a punishment. But 
the colonials could see in this change that spread the French law 
and the established Catholic church of Quebec over the Ohio 
Valley, nothing but a deliberate attempt to set up an enemy in 
their rear. West and south of Detroit were little French communi- 
ties that justified the enlargement of Quebec. At the outlet of the 
Upper Lakes stood the trading post at Mackinaw. On the Wa- 
bash was Vincennes. The east bank of the Mississippi was occu- 
pied at Cahokia and Kaskaskia, a little below St. Louis. Neither 

§ Victor Coffin, The Province of Quebec and the Early American Revolution (1896). 


36 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the ousting of France in 1763 nor the extension of Quebec in 1774, - 
made much difference to the placid hunters and traders of these 
villages. Never used to share in government, and expecting little 
from their rulers, they took one flag or another without excitement 
or regret.4 

The British officers at Detroit saw a chance to distress the Amer- 
ican border as soon as hostilities commenced. By turning loose 
the Indians against the scattered settlements, it might be possible 
to force the diversion of a considerable amount of military strength 
from the main campaigns in order to protect the outposts; and the 
outlying settlements might be prevented by their own danger from 
carrying aid to the new national cause. Sir Henry Hamilton, at 
Detroit, was under the orders of Sir Guy Carleton who commanded 
at Quebec, and both suggested plans and executed them. The 
Indians of the Ohio Valley were warned that American victory 
meant for them an extension of white settlement north of the 
Ohio River. ‘The tales they were hearing of the treaty of Richard 
Henderson at Sycamore Shoals was earnest of this, for the Tran- 
sylvania Company brought the aggressive farmers into the fair 
land of central Kentucky. Another step and they would pass the 
Ohio River itself. The Virginia claim to all the West made that 
State the chief agent in the struggle against Detroit, as it sought to 
prevent both private intrigue with the Indians and the machina- 
tions of the enemy. 

A proclamation addressed by Hamilton to the Indians in June, 
1777, started two movements towards the defense of the Pennsyl- 
vania and Virginia borders. Congress sent a general named Mc- 
Intosh to Pittsburgh in the following spring, and one of the young 
leaders of the frontier went himself to the seat of the Virginia 
government at Williamsburg, to seek assistance in carrying the 
war into the enemy’s country. George Rogers Clark, who per- 
formed this mission, was twenty-five years of age in 1777, and was 
already proficient in the arts of the new settlement. He had an 
interest in speculation, knew how to run a surveyor’s line, and was 


* The Centennial History of Illinois, a monument worthy of frequent imitation, has for 
its first volume Clarence W. Alvord, The Illinois Country (1920). Professor Alvord and 
Professor James A. James have edited for the Collections of the Illinois State Historical 
Library many papers on George Rogers Clark and his predecessors. R. G. Thwaites, How 
George Rogers Clark Won the Northwest, and other Essays in Western History (1903), is 
somewhat out of date, but is by a master of popular narrative. F. J. Turner, “George 
Rogers Clark and the Kaskaskia Campaign,’ in American Historical Review, vol. vim, is 
critical and detailed. 


THE REAR OF THE REVOLUTION 37 


able to shift for himself in open country. At Williamsburg he 
found Patrick Henry installed as governor and engaged in making 
the most of the insurrection he had pressed against England. 
Virginia was big with ideas, but had an empty treasury, and a 
reluctant tax-paying populace. The proposal of Clark to raise a 
force of troops and descend the Ohio River against the French 
towns called for both money and men; the latter to be found in the 
new communities, the former hard to find at all. Keeping the 
project secret from all save an informal group of political leaders, 
Governor Henry sanctioned the measure, gave Clark his commis- 
sion, and authorized him to raise seven companies of fifty men 
each, and to meet his expenses with Virginia scrip. With this war- 
rant, dated January 2, 1778, Clark hurried back to the Mononga- 
hela country to enlist his followers. Of formal military training or 
discipline they had none. There was almost no military appear- 
ance in their band. If they had a flag, it is almost impossible to say 
what one; — although at Oriskany an amateurish stars and stripes 
was improvised from rough materials found in the patriot camp. 
But there were men ready to enlist in such a campaign, though not 
the three hundred and fifty that Clark’s commission contemplated. 
The potential military strength of any American border settle- 
ment needs to be understood in order that the capacity of the 
frontier for war may be realized. In nearly every case the unit 
working on the frontier was a young married couple. Bachelors 
could not operate to best advantage with both farm and cabin to 
be developed. And spinsters, wherever they appeared, were in 
slight danger of remaining such for long, because of the crying 
masculine need for helpmates. As soon, therefore, as a new com- 
munity took shape it had women as well as men, and children 
who arrived even more rapidly than did the terrible diseases of 
undoctored childhood which carried them to the little graveyards. 
For many years there were few unmarried men in any community, 
and as soon as boys grew to manhood they were likely to marry 
and proceed on their own account to found new homes in the 
forest. Recruits for an army could hardly be found, though every 
man carried a deadly gun, and knew how to use it to advantage, 
to economize on precious powder and ball, and to take cover from 
the Indian behind any tree or hillock. For a few weeks men might 
get awayfrom home. But the wife and little ones played upon the 
frontiersman’s imagination as soon as his term of service length- 
ened enough for him to become proficient in any of the specialized 


38 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


duties of the soldier. Desertions soon became numerous. What - 
had to be done needed to be done quickly while the enthusiasm 
lasted, and needed to involve no special organization or training. 
A commander of troops who could find any basis for holding his 
men together after the first three months, and for using them in 
organized strategic efforts, deserves to rank high on the score of 
both human quality and military skill. 

George Rogers Clark learned all these things before the expedi- 
tion to the Illinois country was accomplished. By May he got 
together his first band at Redstone on the Allegheny, and started 
down the Ohio with them in flatboats. The incorrigible propensity 
of the settlements to keep on spreading even in time of war led a 
group of families to trail him to the Falls of the Ohio where they 
made a landing and a settlement. Louisville assumed, appropri- 
ately enough, the name of the French king whose alliance with the 
United States was consummated almost as Clark came to the falls. 
Thereafter it found a certain reason for existence and growth in the 
necessity of nearly every boat that descended the Ohio either to 
have its goods portaged around the rapids, or to be steered through 
them by a professional pilot.° A “‘pincers movement” upon the 
blue grass region of Kentucky begins at this moment; one arm of 
the forceps reaching it through Cumberland Gap, the other touch- 
ing it at the Falls of the Ohio. 

From the site of Louisville Clark advanced by boat to the mouth 
of the Cumberland River, where he landed to make the rest of his 
journey overland. The French alliance doubtless made it easier 
than it otherwise would have been for the French of Kaskaskia to 
accept his control when he took their town on July 4, 1778. Hamil- 
ton at Detroit, meanwhile, was hearing fragments of report upon 
the success of Clark, and was preparing to meet and check him. 
After holding a council with the Indians in June, he marched in the 
autumn through their villages, and descended the Wabash to Vin- 
cennes, where he arrived in December. The road he followed was 
better known to the tribes than any other in the interior of Amer- 
ica. For centuries the Canadian Indians and those of the South 
had visited, and fought, each other up and down the Wabash 
route. No other tributary of the Mississippi gives a better ap- 
proach to the Great Lakes than does this stream, or reaches them 
at a better point. From Toledo Bay, at the northern end of the 
route, Lake Erie provides a natural way to all parts of Ontario. 

® Robert M. McElroy, Kentucky in the Nation’s History (1909), 


THE REAR OF THE REVOLUTION 39 


Ascending the Maumee River from Toledo Bay to its source, there 
is an easy portage to the navigable head of the Wabash. The In- 
dian canoeist, followed in turn by the French missionary, explorer, 
and trapper, used this route from the beginning. Along both the 
Maumee and Wabash were many of the permanent homes of the 
tribes living between the Lakes and the Ohio. Visitors and court- 
ship were linked together. Here on the Wabash were Indians of 
mixed tribal origin, connecting those of the North with those of 
the South. In one of the tepees, perhaps, as Hamilton floated down 
the stream, was a papoose who was destined in the next genera- 
tion to try to unite the western tribes on the basis of blood and the 
control of the Wabash. This was Tecumseh; but before his day the 
destiny of the Old Northwest was to be worked out. 

Clark wintered at Kaskaskia, while Hamilton wintered at Vin- 
cennes, the difference being that the one thought himself secure 
while the other sensed a task not yet done. In the dead of winter 
Clark led his men out of quarters for a march across country to the 
Wabash. The journey, through the marshes of southern Illinois, 
was one of those exploits that sensible men know cannot be ac- 
complished; and Hamilton gave no thought to possible attack. 
His surprise and enforced surrender came unexpectedly in Feb- 
ruary, 1779. Thereafter England made no show of force in the 
lower Ohio country, although there was another expedition in a 
vain attempt to seize Pittsburgh. The frontiersmen whose power 
to fight as individuals helped to break the New York campaign of 
1777 at Bennington and Oriskany, proved capable of an aggressive 
measure when under proper leadership. The historian who has 
tried to identify and describe Clark’s services of supply concludes 
that the campaign was waged on hopes and promises, some of 
which were long in realization. The frontier soldier at his best 
could accomplish things impossible for an army with its tradi- 
tional impedimenta. 

Further south than the Ohio, the frontier bore its share of the 
brunt of the Revolution when in 1780 Cornwallis proposed to en- 
velop Carolina and Virginia, after making a landing at Charleston 
in May. The British were in complete possession of South Caro- 
lina within a few weeks after the surrender of that city, and what 
American forces there were operated only as irregulars and guerril- 
las in the hills of the back country. In August the army that 
Washington sent to the relief of the State was destroyed at Cam- 
den in what John Fiske has characterized as ‘“‘the most disastrous 


40 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


defeat ever inflicted upon an American army, and ignominious . 
withal, since it was incurred through a series of the grossest 
blunders.” ® 

From Charleston to Camden was about halfway to the back 
country of North Carolina where the embattled farmers fought the 
courts and the provincial troops at the Alamance in 1771. The 
advance of Cornwallis’s troops to the interior, in the autumn of 
1780, called the frontier rifles from their cabins to help check the 
invader. It was the kind of attack that border men could well en- 
gage in. They came from South Carolina and Virginia, as well as 
from the Tennessee. John Sevier was there, and Isaac Shelby; 
but it is hard to tell who was captain, or who devised their tactics. 
In October, 1780, they found a detachment of the British penned 
on top of King’s Mountain, in North Carolina, near its southern 
line; entrenched, the commander said, in a “‘place from which all 
the rebels outside of hell cannot drive us.” One by one they 
picked the British off, and rushed the rest from their position. 
Each little group fought by itself with a minimum of direction, 
but in each the average man was trained in the arts that Indian 
fighting had taught him. King’s Mountain turned the southern 
invasion towards its ultimate defeat. The Quaker blacksmith 
general, Greene, took command of the American forces in this last 
winter of the war, and worried the British. He beat them at the 
Cowpens, and held them at Guilford Courthouse. In the fall of 
1781 Cornwallis was maneuvered into that peninsula of the James 
River, where British dominion began in 1607; and here it was sub- 
stantially ended when he surrendered in October, 1781. 

The revolution that had taken place in America between the 
landing at Jamestown and the surrender there, owed much to the 
constant influence upon standards and ideas exerted by people who 
were living a life dominated in its form by the log cabin. It was a 
frontier influence that changed the British, and merged them with 
their co-workers into the American. In actual grievances the men 
of the border had less cause for complaint than either the commer- 
cial people of the seaboard whose routes and markets were being 
brought under regulation by the navigation laws, or the southern 
planters whose heavy debts to their English factors kept them al- 
ways depressed. The limitation upon the right of the border to_ 


§ John Fiske, The American Revolution (1891), is based on lectures that were deservedly 
popular, and that have not yet been excelled in interest for the general reader. The illus 
trated edition of 1897 is all that can be desired in the way of maps and illustrations. 


THE REAR OF THE REVOLUTION 41 


take the land it wanted was the chief grievance in the realm of real 
things. Less tangible was the spirit of independence that throve 
there, and the resentment against any form of control of the indi- 
vidual. 

The independence for which the war was waged was a condition 
precedent to the negotiation of peace after the surrender of Corn- 
wallis. There was no doubt as to the status that must be accorded 
the thirteen colonies and their actually settled areas. On three 
sides, however, there was room for discussion and compromise. 
Quebec had resisted the overtures made by the Continental Con- 
gress, and had avoided either conversion or conquest. It remained 
in hands that valued it for the fur trade of the country behind. 
Florida, at the other end of the seaboard strip, had remained un- 
interested in the thought of independence, and had not been in 
danger of conquest. England was free to dispose of it at pleasure. 
_ The country west of the Appalachians was an area of controversy, 
with enough evidence of occupation or conquest to warrant an 
American claim, yet with a bearing upon the western half of Louisi- 
ana, and Canada, that inspired the British negotiators with a de- 
sire to retain it. The American commissioners, Franklin, Jay, and 
Adams, soon found that the zeal of the French ally had cooled off 
with victory; and that France, glad enough to cripple England, 
had no enthusiasm for erecting an America both independent and 
powerful. The other ally, Spain, watched with jealousy the pro- 
gress of a negotiation that might extend the borders of the United 
States until they joined her own at the Mississippi River. It was 
proposed to the peace commissioners, on behalf of France and 
Spain, that in settling the boundaries England should retain all of 
Canada, and that Canada should include the whole of Quebec as 
enlarged in 1774. Spain was suggested to receive back Florida, 
which she had lost in 1763. The Indians were to retain the area 
between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, and were to be di- 
vided by an arbitrary line east of which they should be under 
American control, and west of which they should owe devotion to 
Spain. 

The frontier, and the events along it during the Revolution, 
seem to have had no direct effect upon the negotiations at Ver- 
sailles, that resulted in the preliminary articles of peace in 1782. 
With both allies willing to restrict American limits for reasons of 
their own, the Americans were driven back to their own courage 
and sagacity in framing the agreement. Their instructions, which 


42 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


showed the skillful hand of the French agents in Philadelphia, - 
were inadequate and had to be disregarded. Even the commis- 
sioners, with all the knowledge they could acquire, could not learn 
enough of the terrain to make a final boundary. In the outcome it 
was not the conquest of Clark that gained the Ohio Valley for the 
United States, but the hope of England to develop a cleavage be- 
tween the former colonies and France, and to reéstablish a basis 
for intimate and friendly trade. By the terms of the Treaty of 
Versailles, concluded on September 3, 1783, the thirteen States 
were recognized as extending to the Mississippi, over the stretch 
of Indian country between Lake Superior and the Lake of the 
Woods on the north, and the thirty-first parallel on the south. 
Spain received back her provinces of Florida, but there was a se- 
cret article in the Anglo-American treaty relating to the northern 
boundary of West Florida that was provocative of trouble for her 
and the United States. 


CHAPTER V 
THE LAND PROBLEM 


THe Treaty of Versailles left in American hands the future of 
American life, but there was little in the past of the former pro- 
vinces to warrant a belief that these hands could grapple with the 
problems of independence, or steer a course at once leading to a 
useful goal and acceptable to all. So uncertain was their unity, 
that England made the treaty not with the United States, but 
with the thirteen States, which were carefully enumerated. The 
colonial history of their governments was drenched with separat- 
ism, which the navigation laws and the various English councils 
dealing with colonial affairs had carefully cherished. Wise ob- 
servers in England believed that the American edifice would soon 
collapse, and wise Americans feared it. After five years of freedom, 
Washington was constrained to tell the weightiest assembly that 
has ever gathered in America — the Constitutional Convention in 
Philadelphia — that “‘it is too probable that no plan that we pro- 
pose will be adopted.”’ The worst years of the critical period were 
those that preceded the ratification of the Federal Constitution 
made in Philadelphia, but for more than half of the next century 
it was easy to find respectable leaders who thought that separation 
from the Union was a probable and proper course.! ‘The strongest 
of the slender bonds that held the States together until common 
interests grew sufficiently close to dominate the local, are to be 
found in the opportunities created and the duties entailed by the 
huge areas of open land, extending along the rear of every State, 
and filling the unoccupied expanse between the ill-fated Proclama- 
tion Line and the Mississippi River. Easy access to the land was 
indispensable to frontier communities, and common interests here 
engendered common purpose. 

The American frontier was a line, a region, or a process, accord- 
ing to the context in which the word is used. As a process, its most 
significant meaning is found. A universal common task was im- 
pressing its standardizing influence upon all the people who came 
within its reach. Everywhere on the frontier civilization was 


1 The extreme independence of the States and their reluctance to admit Federal con- 
trol ure shown in C. H. Van Tyne, The American Revolution (1906). 


Ad. HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


being manufactured out of raw material and personnel. Few per- 
sons came to the frontier except to make homes for themselves, and 
to stake their hardihood and fortune against the chances of isola- 
tion and hardship. Most of them had little to hope for in their 
older homes, and made the emigration to advance their chances 
and their children’s. For the interval between two generations, in 
any frontier region, the typical life was that of the frontier farmer 
clearing his fields and building his cabins. The immediu*‘e family 
need came first, then came the group — the school and the church, 
local government and statehood — and the crafts of industrial 
supply followed the more primitive ones of agriculture. After the 
lapse of twenty or twenty-five years these needs had ordinarily 
been met in any typical frontier region, and the first-born children 
of the early households had grown to maturity and gone off in 
couples to a newer frontier to repeat their parents’ experience. In 
the multiple repetition of this, at every crossroads in America, 
through nearly three centuries, each generation has in turn been 
able to challenge the social values of the common heritage, and to 
modify its institutions to fit the shifting need. History has here 
more nearly repeated itself than in the other experiences of the 
past. This was a social laboratory for the mixed races that thronged 
the continent. The frontier process and its consequences give the 
special meaning to American life. 

The frontier as a region was that area of the United States in 
which the frontier process was going on at any moment. In the 
early seventeenth century it was along the lower courses of the 
Atlantic rivers. In the early eighteenth century it was along the 
piedmont. At the date of the Proclamation Line, it filled up many 
of the parallel valleys of the Appalachians; and until the end of the 
story it was an irregular strip extending across the whole width 
of the United States, and advancing relentlessly towards the set- 
ting sun. Not until 1790 is it possible to speak with precision of the 
frontier line. In the absence of census reports and data on the 
exact location of frontier homes, the historian must write in some- 
what general terms. In 1790, however, the first census under the 
Constitution enumerated enough of the population for it to be pos- 
sible to shade a map showing the average densities, county for 
county. After this date, at each ten-year period, the maps of the 
census reports reveal the unoccupied West, and show the regions 
in which the social average is under two, or six, or eighteen, or 
forty-five, or ninety persons per square mile, The lines that can 


THE LAND PROBLEM 45 


be drawn delimiting the zone of from two to six to the square mile 
are frontier lines, that help the historian to fix his attention upon 
the frontier of any date. 

The American frontiersman had to erect, in the course of a life- 
time, all of the institutions of private or public life that he desired. 
At the start, he was forced to sift them over, and decide which 
duty first. Invariably the earliest of his problems was that of land, 
since his first need was to find a place that he might call his own, 
and build his home. The conditions under which, from decade to 
decade, the frontier farmers acquired their land titles, shaped the 
course of their immediate growth, and left habits of thought or an- 
tipathies that have moulded public opinion and given direction to 
national government. No disturbance has ever succeeded in di- 
verting their attention from the land. In the French wars and the 
Revolution the common soldiers were ever thinking of new homes 
to be acquired, and their officers were debating the chances of 
profitable speculations in western titles. In all of the States there 
was yet, in 1783, an abundance of land waiting to be developed; 
but nowhere was this so in the forefront of public interest as along 
the border, from Albany to Knoxville, in a zone perhaps seven 
hundred and fifty miles long by one hundred miles wide, where the 
average density of population as late as 1790 ranged between two 
and six to the square mile. The landless man and the landless 
State were in the spell of such opportunity; their common bond 
operated to hold the tottering Union upright while it was learning 
how to walk. 

The United States started with persons whose European back- 
ground of experience left them convinced of the importance of the 
ownership of land, and whose energy and character planted them 
in a continent of vast wastes, with nothing between them and 
landed estates but the shadowy title of the Indian occupant, and 
the real barrier of crown control. Such as it was, the Indian title 
covered the whole of North America. The Indian tribes knew 
nothing of the title in fee simple that the English colonists valued, 
and had hardly any glimmering of private ownership or leasehold. 
Rarely did any tribe have undisputed possession of the hunting 
fields it used. Indian titles were plastered over the land, and in 
any tract there were likely to be several tribes to be placated be- 
fore it could be claimed that the crown had acquired title to it. 
But the crown in general established its right to be the sole buyer 
of the tribal lands, and the sole vendor to the colonists. Whether 


46 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


it disposed of the land directly to the settler, as in the crown. 
colonies, or indirectly through the proprietor, as in the pro- 
prietary colonies, it stood ever between the Indian and the 
colonist. 

In the administration of the lands acquired from the Indians 
but unoccupied by whites, the crown and the proprietaries differed 
in general policy. For the crown it was sufficient to take only a fee 
from the purchaser, sixpence an acre, more or less, to ensure the 
regularity of the deed. The proprietor, on the other hand, had am- 
bitions to build up forever a landed family estate, and sought to 
make the land a source of perpetual revenue. His desire was either 
to sell for a substantial price, or to grant the land subject to a 
small annual quit-rent in perpetuity.” To the settler, with his pas- 
sion for land of his own, this proprietary demand was a source of 
continuous grievance. The clash of desires enlivened the politics 
of every province, and carried over into the free States, after inde- 
pendence. 

Whether in the crown or the proprietary colony, the right of the 
squatter was generally one that could be protected. There were no 
preliminary surveys, and no descriptions of the land until some 
desirous settler wrote down the metes and bounds of his tract and 
opened negotiation for a deed. As between two claimants to a 
tract, the occupier or squatter had precedence. That any one 
should be excluded from unoccupied land merely because of the 
demand of the crown, the proprietor, the large owner, or even the 
State, ran against frontier opinion. A more congenial idea was 
the notion that such land was by nature free until some squatter 
should improve it, and then it belonged to him. 

The shock of independence severed the connection of the crown, 
and that of most of the proprietors, from the ownership of the un- 
occupied lands. ‘There were confiscations of ‘Tory property or 
estates that added even occupied land to the tracts to which the 
several independent States laid claim after 1776. Every State 
became something of a landed proprietor by revolutionary right, 
and from the mere possession of land took on something of the 
proprietors’ point of view. Instead of the instant determination 
to dispose freely of this land, as the frontier would have wished, 
the thought arose that here was a visible asset. The lands were 
State property, and might be administered to produce revenue to 


® Beverly W. Bond, The Quit-Rent System in the American Colonies (1919), is standard 
en this. 


THE LAND PROBLEM AT 


maintain the State. The colonial idea that had been strongest in 
the proprietaries spread over all the States, and carried the social 
clash of the colonial period over into the Union. 

A second clash, rooted in the confiscated lands, and serving to 
disturb the spirit of unity, followed independence, as the States 
realized that some had great holdings or claims, and some small. 
The landless States resented the lack of a land endowment, and 
were jealous of the acreage of the former sea-to-sea colonies. In 
New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Mary- 
land,’ the established boundaries of the States were narrow and 
more nearly filled than in New York or Pennsylvania where the 
admitted limits were still far beyond the line of population; or 
in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, South 
Carolina, or Georgia, where the sea-to-sea limits of the old charters 
founded hopes of tracts of land beyond the Alleghanies. 

In every State, and in the Continental Congress, the two con- 

troversies based upon the future of the lands provided an enduring 
basis for political division. In Pennsylvania the agrarian leaders 
from the Susquehanna and Juniata valleys fought the Philadelphia 
aristocrats, and the comfortable farmers of Bucks and Delaware at 
every turn. In Massachusetts, before the end of the seventeen- 
eighties, the farmers of the Connecticut Valley challenged the 
General Court and defied the law of the State. The piedmont 
farmers of Virginia and Carolina realized instinctively the differ- 
ence beween their interests and those of the farmers of the coast. 
And in addition to the wrangle visible in the delegation of nearly 
every State, the smaller States bluntly refused to go ahead with 
Union until their safety was assured, and their aspirations recog- 
nized. 

The first Continental Congress was a revolutionary body, pure 
and simple, deriving its right to exist from the sanction of common 
consent and force. From the earliest meeting in 1774 until nearly 
the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781, it remained a voluntary body, 
without formal authorization or a deliberate constitution. The 
States wanted independence, but were jealous of their complete 
freedom of action. The Congress proposed the adoption of Ar- 
ticles of Confederation, but saw the weary years roll round with- 


3 The Johns Hopkins University Studies, edited by Herbert B. Adams, opened a new era 
in American historical writing; his own monograph in vol. 1, “‘Maryland’s Influence upon 
the Land Cessions to the United States,’’ was among the earliest critical studies of the 
Confederacy. 


48 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


out the unanimous concurrence that was necessary to turn the 
revolutionary basis into one of law. 

The Articles of Confederation were weak and inadequate at 
best. They provided only a meeting place for debate and recom- 
mendation, without power to enforce a decision or to protect the 
majority will. No State was bound to codperate. No executive 
was maintained. All revenue was based on quotas paid through 
good will. No important acts could be taken without a two-thirds 
vote of States. But inferior as the Articles were, they hung in sus- 
pense from the moment of their submission to the States in 1777, 
until the end of 1780. The States were both dilatory, which was 
overcome by time, and suspicious, which was overcome by com- 
promise. The menace of unsettled boundaries was everywhere. 
New York was vexed by the aspirations of Vermont to independ- 
ence. Connecticut and Pennsylvania had bitter litigation over 
conflicting clams. The northern boundary of New Jersey was too 
important to be left to chance. South Carolina and Georgia were 
at odds over the location of the source of the Savannah River, 
upon which their boundaries depended. Maryland became the 
spokesman of the smaller States, and a proper spokesman since she 
had suffered curtailment and compression at the hands of wealthy 
and influential neighbors. 

The background of the Maryland unwillingness to bind herself 
in advance of a satisfactory land settlement begins with the origi- 
nal charter of 1632 granting to the Calverts the tract of Virginia 
lying between the south bank of the Potomac River and the for- 
tieth parallel of north latitude. The crown had at this date taken 
back the original company charter of Virginia, and had thus ac- 
quired the right to readjust the limits of that province. 

The Maryland provincials had constant friction with their well- 
established neighbors, the Virginia planters. The peculiarity of 
the charter that made the boundary not the usual channel of the 
river, but the southern bank, was an outrage in Virginia eyes, for 
no Virginian could wet his feet in Potomac water without commit- 
ting a trespass upon Maryland. But the western end of Maryland 
was described as a line drawn north from the source of the Potomac 
River, and Virginia set about finding as easterly a source as topo- 
graphy and interpretation would allow. Lord Fairfax, the proprie- 
tary owner of the Northern Neck of Virginia, which was bounded 
by the Rappahannock and the Potomac, planted a stone in 1745 
at what he claimed on his own survey to be the “‘first fountain of 


THE LAND PROBLEM 49 


the Pattowmack.”’ It was not so far west as Maryland thought the 
source ought to be; nor yet so far east as Virginia once insisted 
when she advanced the claim that the real Potomac begins at 
Harper’s Ferry where the Shenandoah enters. Maryland felt de- 
frauded, but was as impotent to better herself on the west as she 
was on the north where the impressive colony of William Penn 
bore down upon her. 

The Penn contention to a southern boundary at the thirty-ninth 
parallel, because the charter of 1681 read from the “beginning of 
the fortieth degree,” threatened to deprive Maryland of a sixty 
mile strip along her greatest length. The tardy settlement of this 
contest, and the survey of Mason and Dixon’s line, stilled the 
dispute but cost Maryland much of the debated strip. She had 
long before lost the three counties on the Delaware, below Phila- 
delphia, that became the State of Delaware. 

Basing her opposition on her fear of the western lands in hostile 
hands, and the claim that having been won by the common effort 
they ought to be used for common purposes, Maryland did not 
ratify the Articles of Confederation until Congress had taken up 
her cause and the larger States had yielded. In 1780 Congress, 
with the Articles still ineffective, and with only a revolutionary 
basis of authority, invited the States claiming western lands to 
cede them to the United States for common use. It pledged a fair 
distribution, and application of the proceeds to the common pur- 
pose, and the ultimate creation of new States as the ceded lands 
filled up. 

New York led the larger States in accepting the condition of 
union, perhaps because the validity of her title was slighter than 
that of the others. Connecticut followed, with a partial surrender 
that Congress could not at first accept. Virginia agreed to give up 
the lands north of the Ohio River, and upon this evidence of good 
will and common spirit, Maryland avowed herself satisfied. Every 
State but Maryland had ratified the Articles before the end of 
1780. On March 1, 1781, by the direction of the legislature of 
Maryland, her delegates in Congress signed the Articles, which 
became effective at once. A Union was established, but, more im- 
portant perhaps, the Union had a definite task for which its au- 
thority was adequate. The Articles of Confederation did not 
create a sufficient Union to govern the United States; but the 
Congress as trustee had a property problem that kept it from van- 
ishing into nothingness. 


CHAPTER VI 
CREATION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 


In the dark autumn of 1780, with Carolina and Virginia overrun 
by British troops, and with the gleam of hope that came from the 
inspiring news of King’s Mountain not yet visible, Congress made 
its desperate effort to procure at least an act of government. On 
September 6 it urged the States with western lands to cede them 
to the Union; and on October 10 it repeated the urging, promising 
that they should “‘be disposed of for the common benefit of the 
United States.” It pledged its faith that as the lands were occu- 
pied they should be divided into new commonwealths, with admis- 
sion to the Union as a natural goal. With Vermont maintaining 
an independent though not recognized government, with the set- 
tlers along the Watauga now eight years old in their aspirations, 
and with James Robertson and his Cumberland pioneers in the 
act of formulating their Nashboro agreement, it was evident that 
the number of the States would not long remain thirteen. The 
world has few earlier glimpses than this of a growing federal com- 
monwealth, with increasing members, and with no desire for per- 
manent dependents. The fate of the Articles hinged upon the 
response to this appeal; and with it perhaps the fate of the Union 
itself, and the world’s most promising experiment in federalism. 
The suggestion of an appeal had been made by New York for the 
sake of harmony. Connecticut welcomed it as ‘“‘an Event most 
desirable and important to the Liberty and Independence of the 
rising Empire.” 

The legal basis of the claims, whose surrender was asked by the 
nervous little States, was in the series of charters issued by the 
English crown to various companies, proprietors, or colonies. The 
list begins with the first Virginia charter of 1606. The last colony 
charter was that of Georgia in 1732. After this time there were 
numerous proclamations and orders of the king in council that 
affected the boundaries, but the period was one of detailed adjust- 
ment rather than of new creation. The English law permitted the 
king to treat the overseas lands as dependencies of himself, and 
Parliament had not meddled with colonial limits. In general the 
crown reserved to itself the right to alter boundaries that it had 


CREATION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 51 


fixed. The latest grant was the effective one. The proprietaries 
were a partial exception to this, for the crown regarded the gift of 
land to a lord proprietor as a closed transaction, not subject to 
modification more than the property rights of any other subject. 
The Proclamation of 1763 did not change the ultimate legal right 
of any of the various claimants to colonial lands. It merely de- 
ferred their enjoyment; and in the absence of any new colonial 
creations after 1763, except Quebec, which was based on act of 
Parliament in 1774, the independent States retained whatever 
claims they had. None of the States treated the Quebec Act as 
legally changing their status, and the United States did not ad- 
vance the claim that it might well have pushed, that the country 
north of the Ohio River having been cut off by English law had 
become national property, with succession to the Union rather 
than to the original claimant States. The Quebec Act was regarded 
by the United States as an act of war and not of law. 

The New York proposal for a general cession was embodied in 
a tender, dated February 19, 1780, “‘ to facilitate the Completion 
of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union among the 
United States of America.”’ When Charles IT granted the New 
Netherlands to the Duke of York, the charters of 1664 and 1674 
conveyed a tract of land between the Delaware and Connecticut 
rivers and dominated by the settlements already planted along the 
Hudson. In spite of the assertion of the charters that the Connecti- 
cut River was to be the eastern limit, it was never practicable for 
New York to establish it. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut 
were already in possession, with groups of settlers in the valley that 
could be neither dispossessed nor displaced. It was convenient to 
compromise. In 1731 a definite agreement was reached with Con- 
necticut, and in 1783 with Massachusetts, by which irregular lines 
some twenty miles east of the Hudson were established in provin- 
cial law. They had been reached de facto many years earlier, when 
the contesting jurisdictions there took a state of practical equilib- 
rium.! 

But north of Massachusetts, New York pressed the claim to ex- 
tend to the Connecticut, with a logic that increased in weight after 
England separated and delimited New Hampshire. It took an 


1 Henry Gannett, Boundaries of the United States and of the Several States and Territories 
(3d ed., 1904), was printed as Bulletin, No. 226, of the United States Geological Survey. 
It is the most convenient summary of boundary matters, and contains valuable maps which 
are generally accurate. 


52 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


order in council in 1764 to settle the dispute so far as Massachu- 
setts was concerned. But the local population was a different mat- 
ter and rejected the jurisdiction of New York, aspiring to state- 
hood as Vermont. 

West of the Delaware, New York had no charter claim, but no 
subsequent colony received a grant of the lands between the Dela- 
ware and Lake Ontario. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix procured, 
in 1768, an Indian cession of title south of an irregular line, and 
New York, when independent, laid claim to what the crown had 
thus acquired, as well as to whatever the Six Nations might own, 
wherever situated. In assuming to be the successor of the crown 
as to the Six Nations, New York took over an indefinite assump- 
tion that ran as far as the Ohio River and Kentucky, for the Six 
Nations were mighty warriors with a place in the sun that spread 
far into the continent. 

Massachusetts, senior to New York in creation, accepted the 
hard fact that New York cut across her on the west, but kept alive 
a claim to land beyond the Delaware and comprehended in her 
sea-to-sea grant of 1629. It was not certain how good this claim 
was, for the second Massachusetts charter, issued in 1691 after 
the New York grants, described her domain as ‘“‘parte of New 
England in America,” and did not mention a sea-to-sea extension. 
Weak as the Massachusetts claim was, that of New York was no 
stronger. The two States had not come to an agreement as to their 
property west of the Delaware when New York offered to cede 
to Congress whatever she might have of title west of Lake Ontario 
and the Niagara River. Congress accepted a quit-claim from New 
York in 1781. Five years later New York and Massachusetts di- 
vided the title to the land between the Niagara and the Delaware, 
and vested the political sovereignty of all of it in New York. 

All that Congress could accept from New York was a quit- 
claim, since the territory covered by it was claimed with just as 
much show of right by Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. 
The Virginia claim was based on the mystifying description in the 
second charter of the province, issued by James I in 1609. The 
seaboard limits conveyed were entirely clear, extending from Old 
Point Comfort two hundred miles in either direction along the 
coast. But at this point the inspired draftsman who drew up the 
charter made a rhetorical flourish incapable of application. He 
wrote: “up into the Land, throughout from Sea to Sea, West, and 
Northwest.” 


CREATION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 53 


No court and no cartographer could ever have drawn a bound- 
ary line running at once west and northwest. It became a com- 
mon Virginia interpretation, though without sanction, that one of 
the lines should be drawn west, and the other northwest. Virginia 
naturally enough preferred that it should be the southern bound- 
ary to run west, and the northern, starting not far from the pres- 
ent site of Atlantic City, to run northwest. In the course of years 
the location of the southern charter boundary became academic, 
for the crown issued a Carolina grant that drew a new and im- 
movable line. To the north, Maryland and Pennsylvania removed 
tracts that had fallen within the limits of the Virginia claim. But 
in 1781 Virginia was still unmoved in her contention that of right 
her northwest line, beyond the area of Pennsylvania, ran through 
the Great Lakes and included the whole of the Old Northwest. 

Not only had the Old Dominion the broadest of pretensions, but 
she had made the most lavish use of them. The speculations of the 
Virginia gentry touched the Ohio River before the middle of the 
eighteenth century, and each of the colonial wars was followed by 
the issuance of a shoal of warrants to officers and men, entitling 
them to bounties from the open lands. The heaviest settlement of 
the Appalachian valleys, outside Pennsylvania, was on Virginia 
soil and under her titles. The Great Kanawha and Cumberland 
rivers tempted her citizens to further fields within her jurisdiction. 
And the victories of George Rogers Clark were under her com- 
mission, while his conquests were organized by her legislature as 
Illinois County. When Maryland called upon Virginia to deliver 
the western lands to Congress, the latter could truthfully say that 
she no longer controlled most of them. The best estimates of the 
acreage granted in sales or bounties to 1781 (for her bookkeeping 
was far from precise and surveys were often poetic in their inac- 
curacy), indicated that already more than the area of West Vir- 
ginia and Kentucky would be required, and that there was a sub- 
stantial amount to be taken from the country north of the Ohio. 
It was impossible to cancel the grants already made or the war- 
rants outstanding. The Virginia offer of January 2, 1781, was of a 
cession to Congress of what there remained north of the Ohio, re- 
serving for warrants that could not be satisfied in Kentucky as 
much of the country between the Scioto and the Great Miami 
rivers as might be needed. 

There was much dickering between Congress and Virginia be- 
fore they were able to agree upon the phraseology of a deed, and 


54 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


execute it May 1, 1784. In this, as in other cases, Virginia desired 
to receive in exchange for what she surrendered a guarantee of 
title to what she retained. In particular she desired to be protected 
in her claim to all of Kentucky. Congress could accept only what 
the States had to give and was in no position to admit that they 
really owned it or to stabilize the title to anything else. Eventu- 
ally they compromised, as the cessions proceeded far enough to 
indicate that all would yield and that there would be no move- 
ment to dispossess any. There had been pioneer settlements in 
Kentucky for many years before the northwest country was thus 
transferred to Congress, and the completion of the transaction 
marks a beginning of a Kentucky movement for the creation of an 
independent State within the limits of the old Kentucky County. 

The Massachusetts western lands followed those of New York 
and Virginia into the public domain. As a part of the negotiations 
over the New York cession that State and Massachusetts deter- 
mined to let Congress have whatever there was west of the Ni- 
agara River. In November, 1784, Massachusetts transferred her 
claim to the strip across Michigan and Wisconsin, extending to the 
Mississippi River. In the next two years, and after threats of 
referring the matter to a land court to be organized by Congress 
under the Articles, the New York compromise was reached. ‘The 
western limit beyond which both New York and Massachusetts 
gave up their claims, was defined as a line that should run due 
south from the western tip of Lake Ontario, or twenty miles west 
of the Niagara River, according as the surveys should determine 
which of the lines was westernmost. When this was run a few 
years later, the line of the Niagara was found to be too far east to 
meet the requirement; the line of the tip of Ontario fell a little east 
of the western boundary of Pennsylvania, and cut off a little tri- 
angle of Congress lands above the northwest corner of that State. 
This later became the Pennsylvania “triangle.” 

The completion of the Connecticut cession was delayed until 
1786. The original charter of 1662 described a tract bounded on 
the north by Massachusetts and on the south by the South Sea; 
and only a moderation unusual among colonies kept Connecticut 
from claiming under it a title to the whole southern end of the con- 
tinent. ‘The erection of New York established a practical western 
limit to Connecticut, and it was expedient to compromise upon a 
convenient de facto line somewhat east of the Hudson. But, like 
Massachnsetts, Connecticut admitted only what she must and 


CREATION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 55 


kept alive her claim to the western extension of her strip beyond 
the Delaware. When William Penn received his grant in 1681, ex- 
tending from the Delaware five degrees of longitude to the west, 
and in latitude from the beginning of the fortieth to the beginning 
of the forty-third degrees, Connecticut refused to be reconciled. 
Even when fixed on the north at the forty-second parallel (for 
Penn's interpretation of his south line was used against him at 
the north), Pennsylvania stretched like a barrier across the whole 
width of Connecticut. In spite of this, the Connecticut general 
court disposed of lands in the Pennsylvania tract and tried to de- 
fend the titles by force. A civil war threatened, when Congress 
intervened as judge to stop it. In 1782 a special court upheld the 
superiority of the Pennsylvania claim. West of Pennsylvania the 
Connecticut pretension remained, and like Virginia she wished to 
retain part of the area to satisfy grants to her revolutionary sol- 
diers and sufferers from pillage and destruction by British troops. 
As finally accepted by Congress, the cession commenced one hun- 
dred and twenty miles west of the Pennsylvania line. The Con- 
necticut Reserve east of that point was retained in both title and 
jurisdiction for the present. 

It was the creation of the province of Carolina in 1663, with a 
modified boundary in 1665, that gave to Virginia a limit on the 
south that could not be contested. South of thirty-six degrees, 
thirty minutes of north latitude, Carolina stretched down the At- 
lantic shore to a point so far in Florida that no one ever seriously 
believed that the English crown could bestow it. There was never 
a fixed settlement with Spain upon the limits between Florida and 
Carolina; but in 1732 England reduced the province by establish- 
ing Georgia between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers, and their 
sources projected westward from sea to sea. If England owned 
anything south of the Altamaha, which is highly doubtful, Caro- 
lina might have retained some sort of title to it. At any rate South 
Carolina long nourished such a claim. The division of the two 
Carolinas in 1729, along the thirty-fifth parallel, continued by an 
arbitrary line down to the coast, did not alter the gross claims of 
the two provinces. 

After 1732, South Carolina disputed with Georgia the location 
of their common boundary, west of the ““most northern part,”’ or 
head, of the Savannah. Like the Potomac, and the Connecticut, 
and the St. Croix, each of whose headwaters was the origin of 
boundary litigation, the Savannah originates in a group of streams 


56 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


converging from every angle near the head. Georgia sought to 
defend the most northern head that could be found. South Caro- 
lina argued that the name Savannah was not locally used to de- 
scribe the stream above the point where the Tugaloo from the 
north meets the Keowee, from the west, and that at this junction 
the western parallel must start. The strip that South Carolina 
ceded to Congress on March 8, 1787, existed only if her title against 
Georgia was valid. On April 28, in the same year, in a treaty be- 
tween the two States made at Beaufort, South Carolina yielded 
to the Georgia interpretation and accepted the Tugaloo as the 
Savannah, and its source as the starting-point. Geographers have 
differed as to whether this left any strip north of this point and 
south of the North Carolina line of thirty-five degrees that would 
warrant South Carolina to be included among the States having 
western lands to cede. 

North Carolina had ceded, repented of it, and recalled the ces- 
sion before South Carolina acted.? Her western claim was as 
nearly uncontested as that of Virginia to Kentucky. No other 
colony had ever encroached upon it. There were difficulties in 
marking, due to faulty surveys made by the amateur engineers who 
tried to run the lines, but there was no dispute in principle. The 
Watauga and Cumberland settlements, both within the North 
Carolina zone, showed the accessibility of the country to the pio- 
neers crowding over the western rims of the Appalachian Valleys. 
The suggestion by Congress that the State quotas for common ex- 
penses ought to be based upon land areas, induced a willingness to 
cede this unoccupied land to Congress. But the cession of 1784 was 
not accepted promptly, and when the mountaineers rose up to 
create their State of Franklin, North Carolina reéstablished her 
authority in the West and held it for five years more. On Decem- 
ber 22, 1789, after the new Federal Constitution was in force, the 
cession was renewed; and in the following spring Congress provided 
it with a government. But by this time there was no area left un- 
claimed that could be included in the public domain. The cession 
was one of sovereignty rather than of land title. In neither Ken- 
tucky nor ‘Tennessee were there ever any public lands belonging to 
the United States. 

After South Carolina, only Georgia remained with anything to 


2 J. C. Welling, “‘States’ Rights Conflict over the Public Lands,’’ in American Historical 
Association, Papers, 1889; St. George L. Sioussat, “North Carolina Land Cession in its 
Federal Aspects,’’ in Mississippi Valley Historical Association, Proceedings, 1908-1909. 


CREATION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 57 


cede to Congress. The moderate clearness of her original charter 
limits had been lost after the Proclamation of 1763 when it suited 
the convenience of England to enlarge the jurisdiction of the new- 
est colony. In that proclamation, in the adjustment of the bound- 
ary of East and West Florida, there was left unclaimed a tract 
lying between the St. Mary’s River, the northern limit of East 
Florida, and the Altamaha, the southern limit of Georgia. This, 
the English Board of Trade recommended, should be annexed to 
Georgia, and it was done. 

Since the same document that extended Georgia to the St. 
Mary’s forbade the issuance of any grant of lands beyond the Proc- 
lamation Line, it seems doubtful if Georgia could acquire by it 
any title to lands west of the Atlantic rivers. But Georgia con- 
strued the extension as extending to the Florida line throughout 
and following the thirty-first parallel even to the Mississippi. 
When England expanded West Florida to the parallel of the Yazoo 
River, Georgia was thereby restricted; but when the United States 
in the Treaty of Versailles received the thirty-first parallel as its 
boundary, Georgia asserted that its territory had been returned 
to it, and claimed this Yazoo strip. South Carolina, too, claimed 
this strip, and the United States itself; while Spain, because of the 
secret article relating to the strip (it was to have remained English 
had England decided to keep Florida for herself at Paris) believed 
that the true boundary of West Florida as ceded to her in the 
treaty, was at the Yazoo line. 

Not until April 24, 1802, was Georgia willing to surrender to the 
United States either this Yazoo strip, to which her title was so 
flimsy, or the extension between the heads of the Savannah and 
Altamaha, to which her claim was good. She had meanwhile spec- 
ulated in part of the area, and her legislature had yielded to temp- 
tation and furnished one of the most glaring cases of public 
corruption that the United States has known.’ The Yazoo lands 
became a public scandal, and eventually the Supreme Court of the 
United States, in Fletcher vs. Peck, handed down one of the most 
momentous of its decisions in a case arising from these specula- 
tions. The responsibility for corrupt officials was placed squarely 
upon the constituency that elected them, and the State was held 
bound by the acts of whomsoever it entrusted with responsibil- 
ity. But, in the end, Congress was induced to compensate the 


? Charles H. Haskins, ‘The Yazoo Land Companies,” in American Historical Associa- 
tion, Papers, 1891. 


58 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


citizens who were defrauded by the corruption of the Yazoo spec-. 
ulators. 

Between 1780 and 1802 the public domain was in process of 
creation. From the earliest cession, Congress became involved in 
a trust that no other authority could share. As the area of cession 
grew, the power to make or mar an empire was lodged in the 
United States. Before the series of surrenders was completed by 
the Georgia act population had begun to flow over the public do- 
main in a broad wave, and two new States had been organized in 
the West. The Articles of Confederation had by this time revealed 
all their weaknesses and had been overturned by a revolution so 
negligent that the old Congress was never adjourned, but simply 
died from lack of delegates and quorum. The new Constitution 
arose from the experiences of the critical period. The function of 
the Articles was to hold the thirteen States convergent until their 
majority was ready for Union. The common property in the pub- 
lic domain prevented the abandonment of the Articles before the 
people had learned the lesson of the “‘more perfect union.” 


CHAPTER VII 
THE NATIONAL LAND SYSTEM 


BrFork the final deeds were executed transferring to Congress the 
land cessions of New York and Virginia, movements had begun for 
the developing of the public domain, and it was necessary for 
Congress to adopt some policy for its management and distribu- 
tion.! The two basic ideas upon land policy from which it was free 
to make a selection were those of New England and the South. 
There was little tendency to improvise a doctrinaire theory, for 
most of the men concerned were hard-headed owners of the land 
themselves. But there had been two sharply defined systems in 
_ force, each with its merits and defects. 

In the southern colonies the planter had operated as an indi- 
vidual, prospecting for himself, selecting his tracts for purchase, 
defining the meanderings of his boundaries with as much accuracy 
as he could, and then procuring title from the province and record 
of his deeds at the county court. The method harmonized with the 
strong individuality of the frontier farmer and his uneasiness under 
restraint. But it produced conflicts of claims and interminable 
litigation over titles, much of which was not susceptible of precise 
adjudication. When the United States Government, in recent 
years, purchased large tracts of mountain land for the Appalachian 
Forest Reserve and insisted upon clear titles from the beginning, 
it found frequent discrepancies in the descriptions of property in 
the original deeds. Overlaps were common; and often it happened 
when the boundaries were plotted that little tracts of no-man’s- 
land appeared between two defined lines that had been supposed 
to be identical. In the rapid settlement of Kentucky and Tennes- 
see, where the southern system prevailed, the frontier lawyer 
sharpened his wits and filled his purse for years from the proceeds 
of boundary suits. 

New England, with a stronger community sense and a different 

1 Payson J. Treat, National Land System, 1785-1820 (1910), is excellent so far as it goes, 
but there is still great need for a general historian of the public lands. Thomas Donaldson, 
The Public Domain, Its History (1884), has all the defects of government documents, but 
the historian cannot get along without it. Its tables may be supplemented by those in the 


Report of President Roosevelt’s Public Lands Commission (58th Congress, 3d Session, 
Senate Document 189, Serial 4766). 


60 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


type of farming, never became addicted to the loose system of the . 
South, but adhered to the town or township method. The land 
was granted in large lots to town groups and subdivided and re- 
corded within the town. There was less straggling of the frontier 
as a result and greater certainty as to property rights. The 
boundaries of the towns could be defined in advance of the grant, 
leading to a system of prior survey before settlement that avoided 
many of the vexations from which the southern planter suffered. 

In Congress there were men experienced in both systems and 
advocates of each. As soon as the policy towards the ceded lands 
came under discussion, there was clash of views and in the out- 
come a compromise that contained more of the northern practice 
than of the southern. The soldiers of the Continental Army, still 
under arms in 1783, were among the earliest applicants for western 
rights and started with their petitions the chain of events that 
ripened in 1787 into the Ordinance for the Government of the 
Lands Northwest of the Ohio River. 

The troops at Newburgh on the Hudson, in 1783, knew that 
they would be happy some day but were filled with immediate dis- 
content as they thought of the return to private life. In May the 
officers formed the hereditary Society of the Cincinnati, that they 
and their sons might properly remember and commemorate the 
hardships and glories of the Revolution. In June, the men, under 
the lead of Rufus Putnam and with the approval of their officers, 
demanded that Congress make provision for their needs out of the 
western domain. Washington received their memorial and for- 
warded it with his endorsement to Congress. What they wanted 
was a soldiers’ State, west of the Ohio, with land payments to 
supplement the scanty pay and depreciated money that they 
were offered. Washington approved this scheme, though he had 
for himself a larger project. In 1784 he traveled through Western 
Virginia, almost to the Ohio, looking over the prospects for the 
development of a Potomac Company that was to speculate in 
lands towards the Ohio and build a canal along the Potomac that 
should direct the trade of the new settlements forever to the East. 
He was afraid that unless directed firmly the straggling West 
would get beyond control and so he gave his moral sanction to 
Jay’s proposal to agree with Spain that the Mississippi River 
should be closed to navigation for a term of years. Out of the 
Virginia and Maryland conferences that his Potomac Company 
engendered grew the trade convention and finally the Constitu- 


THE NATIONAL LAND SYSTEM 61 


tional Convention in Philadelphia, in 1787. But before this date 
Congress had laid down the general principles of a land policy. 

With the cessions of New York and Virginia completed, Con- 
gress signed a treaty with the New York Indians at Fort Stanwix, 
October 22, 1784. With the approval of Red Jacket and Corn- 
planter, the elder statesmen of the Seneca, who knew the futility 
of Indian resistance, the Six’ Nations confirmed the old Treaty of 
Fort Stanwix (1768) and added a cession of their whole claim to 
any part of Pennsylvania. They pretended as well to cede the 
country north of the Ohio River, to which their title was founded 
on shadowy conquests which the resident tribes in Ohio would not 
recognize. On January 21, 1785, Fort McIntosh on the Ohio 
River thirty miles below Pittsburgh was the scene of another 
treaty in which Wyandot, Delaware, Chippewa, and Ottawa 
braves agreed to a southern boundary in the vicinity of the water- 
shed between Lake Erie and the Ohio River and west of the Cuya- 
hoga. A handful of Congress troops moved down the Ohio River 
at once and planted at the mouth of the Muskingum a station that 
took the name Fort Harmar. ‘The treaties had little effect upon 
the minds of the occupying Indians who did not recognize their 
cessions for another decade, but they constitute the beginning of 
the acquisition by the United States Government of Indian titles 
which remained, as ever, a condition precedent to private develop- 
ment. 

Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, who was chairman of a com- 
mittee of Congress that brought in a scheme for the partition of 
the ceded lands in March, 1784, knew the disadvantages of an 
uncertain land policy. In his forty-first year now, he was already 
a distinguished statesman. He had seen service in Congress and 
in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He had followed Patrick 
Henry as governor of Virginia in 1779 and was shortly to go abroad 
on that trip of European residence that brought him into intimate 
touch with the philosophers of the new era in France. As governor 
of Virginia he had both adjusted the contested boundary with 
Pennsylvania and directed the transfer of the Virginia lands to 
Congress. He knew about soldiers’ bounties, and squatter rights, 
and the impatience of frontier opinion when the activities of their 
governments did not suit them. No mind in America was more 
fertile in drafting schemes for the common benefit, many of which 
worked well in practice. 

The report of 1784 and the Ordinance of April 23 that was based 


62 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


upon it have slipped attention through the greater interest that - 
the later Ordinance of 1787 has aroused. It contained, however, 
the basis of a colonial policy elaborated out of the pledges that 
Congress had already given as to the custody and future of the 
western lands. The perpetual guarantees that Jefferson desired 





Jefferson’s Proposal of 1784 


to have form a bill of rights for the new colonies contemplated 
that they (1) should forever remain a part of the United States, 
(2) be subject to the Congress and the Articles of Confederation, 
(3) pay their share of the revolutionary debts, (4) maintain gov- 
ernments republican in form, and (5) be free from slavery after 
1800. The last of these guarantees was stricken out before the 
ordinance passed. 

As to statehood, Jefferson proposed loose and inadequate terms 


THE NATIONAL LAND SYSTEM 63 


of admission and a whimsical scheme for the partition of the 
Northwest. New States were to be admitted from the Northwest 
when they had a population equal to that of the smallest State 
already in the Union and when Congress by two-thirds vote (nine 
States) approved; and they were to come in on terms of equality. 
The scheme was weak because it provided no machinery for or- 
ganizing the States and no preliminary government before the 
population became adequate for statehood; both of which points 
were remedied before the first new State was admitted to the 
Union. The partition arrangement paid no attention to waterways 
or to drift of population but called for ten States, eventually, with 
artificial boundaries along the parallels of latitude, and with names 
which show how erratic a sensible man like Jefferson could some- 
times be: Sylvania, Michigania, Assenisippia, Illinoia, Polypota- 
mia, Cherronesus, Metropotamia, Saratoga, Pelisipia, and Wash- 
ington. Congress omitted the boundary scheme from the final 
ordinance. 

The Ordinance of 1784 indicates a quickening of Congress’s 
interest in the task ahead, but the creation of new settlements 
along the Ohio was not yet practical politics until the treaties had 
been arranged with the Indians. A second report from the com- 
mittee on the western lands, in the spring of 1784, brought in 
matters upon the survey and subdivision of the public domain to 
which Jefferson had given much attention before sailing as minis- 
ter to France. It became the Ordinance of May 20, 1785. 

“The principle of rectangular surveys was established in our 
national land system,” by the Ordinance of 1785, says Professor 
Ford, who has made the most careful study of the colonial prec- 
edents of the public domain. The rectangular system was by no 
means new in concept, but no colony had possessed the means to 
administer a large scheme of preliminary surveys before the lands 
in question came upon the market. The novelty of the method as 
here applied lay in the determination to make careful surveys of 
townships six miles square, and of the thirty-six internal sections 
in each, before disposing of the public lands.’ 

The small beginnings of the public land survey took place in 
1785-1786 under Captain Thomas Hutchins, geographer of the 
United States, who was assisted by a board of surveyors, upon 
which each State was entitled to place a member of its own choice. 


2 Amelia C. Ford, Colonial Precedents of our National Land System as tt existed in 1800 
(1910). 


64 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Massachusetts nominated General Rufus Putnam for its surveyor, 
but subsequently substituted Benjamin Tupper, to whom with 
Putnam, the United States is much indebted for the immediate 
outcome of its plan. It was proposed, first, to establish a principal 
meridian, along which to lay the parallel ranges of townships. 
The intersection of the Ohio River with a western projection of 
the southern boundary of Pennsylvania was made the starting- 
point; and between the meridian of this point and the western 
boundary of Pennsylvania the seven ranges of townships, for 
which there was room, were marked in the next few months. The 
Indians, who had not realized that the surrender of their lands 
would be followed by the entry of survey gangs, obstructed the 
running of the lines, but were held away by United States troops; 
while the enterprising squatters who had sneaked in their cabins 
on the right bank of the Ohio were dispossessed by the same force. 
By the survey law, one seventh of the land as surveyed was re- 
served to be distributed among the men of the Continental Army 
who held land warrants. The balance was to go to the States by 
lot according to their quotas of taxes. Alternate sections were to 
be disposed of as a whole; the others were to be broken up and sold 
in tracts as small as single sections. The town of Wheeling, in 
Virginia, on the upper Ohio River, now acquired a rival in Steu- 
benville, farther up on the western bank. The soldiers and the 
surveyors made this the gateway to the Seven Ranges of Ohio. 

There was still no provision for the erection of government 
among the buyers of the Congress lands or the settlers in the 
Virginia Military Reserve, and while the survey of the Seven 
Ranges was under way the need for this became imperative. Put- 
nam and Tupper were prime movers in advancing this necessity, 
for to an innate desire to speculate in unoccupied lands the ex- 
perience of Tupper in the Ohio country added a local knowledge 
of the resources of this region. Putnam and his friends had for 
three years been cherishing the idea of a western soldiers’ State, 
and when Tupper visited him at his home in Rutland early in 
1786, the plan ripened into action. , 

On the first of March they called a caucus of their military 
friends at the Bunch of Grapes tavern in Boston to discuss the 
formation of a land company to be financed with the worthless 
continental currency that Congress had forced upon them while 
in the service.* ‘The group had much in common, as Professor 

§ John Bach McMaster discussed these matters in vol. 1 of his monumental History of the 


THE NATIONAL LAND SYSIEM 65 


Hulbert has shown. Besides their military recollections, many 
were brothers of the Society of the Cincinnati, and a large number 
of them were members of that famous Masonic Lodge that had 
been formed at Washington’s headquarters and had followed with 
the commander-in-chief all the wanderings and vicissitudes of the 
Revolution. At this meeting it was decided to form a company of 
one thousand shares, of one thousand dollars each, payable in 
continental money, and to ask Congress to be allowed to buy a 
tract of land with the capital thus raised. The money was worth- 
less in ordinary use, but it had been issued by Congress accompa- 
nied by a public promise to pay, and Congress could not well re- 
fuse to receive it back. Since under the Ordinance of 1785 no 
provision existed for the sale of more than one township, it would 
be necessary to have a new law passed; and since no scheme of 
government was ready, one would have to be provided. Putnam, 
_ Parsons of Connecticut, and the Rev. Manasseh Cutler became 
the first agents of the Ohio Associates, as they called themselves, 
to present their demand to Congress after a second meeting for 
organization held in 1787.4 

The Continental Congress, when Samuel Parsons presented his 
memorial to it on May 9, 1787, had ceased to be an imposing body. 
Its appeals to the States for amendments that would enable it to 
carry on the public business had been ignored. ‘The indifference 
of the States made it uncertain whether even a quorum of mem- 
bers could be maintained. A Constitutional Convention, to meet 
in Philadelphia in May, was about to drive it into oblivion. Only 
the business of the public lands kept it alive but not too active. 
No immediate attention was given to the memorial of the Ohio 
Associates, but on the following day James Monroe brought in a 
report on the government of the Northwest that would have re- 
ceived consideration had there been a quorum to debate it. From 


People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, which appeared in 1883. No 
other general writer has given as much space or as careful attention to the details of western 
local history as he has done in his eight great volumes. Five years after his first volume 
the ground was again traversed by John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History 
(1888). 

4 The chance that placed Archer B. Hulbert in a professorship at Marietta College for 
several years, gave him access to valuable manuscripts. He improved the opportunity in 
The Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company (1917), ‘Andrew Craigie and 
the Scioto Associates,’’ in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, N.S., 
vol. xxi, and “‘The Methods and Operations of the Scioto Group of Speculators,”’ in 
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 1. See also W. P. and J. P. Cutler, Life, Journals, 
and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL.D. (1888), and C. 8. Hall, Life and Letters 
of Samuel Holden Parsons (1905). 


66 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


May 12 to July 5 it was impracticable to get a quorum competent - 
to transact business, and Congress could only adjourn from day to 
day, while Parsons preached his doctrine to the members out of 
hours. When business resumed, Cutler had arrived and had taken 
charge of the negotiation, and events moved forward to a quick 
conclusion, whose details are never likely to be known. On July 
13 the Northwest Ordinance was passed; two weeks later the 
special act for a sale to the Ohio Associates became a law, and on 
October 27 the final contract was signed and sealed. 

Alone among the acts of the old Congress this Ordinance of 
1787 stands out as a great constructive measure. That its genesis 
may be found in Jefferson’s Ordinance of 1784 is entirely clear, 
but the elaborations upon his idea and the practical improvements 
are SO sweeping as to show the touch of other hands and interests. 
The report of Monroe that was handed to Congress in the spring 
of 1787 shows that he was not conscious of the project of the Ohio 
Associates. When after the lapse of quorum the matter was taken 
up again, the influence of Cutler, unmeasured but manifest, was 
at work. A new committee with a different personnel was charged 
with the task, and the names upon it are those of friends upon 
whom Parsons and Cutler had been exerting their powers of per- 
suasion. On July 9 the report went back to this new committee; 
on the 11th a new report was made; on the 13th it was adopted. 

It seems improbable that the authorship of the resulting law 
ean be established or that there can be a precise measuring of the 
forces behind it. The long-realized need for a workable law was 
there. The dazzling influence of a request to purchase a million 
dollars’ worth of land — even a million continental dollars’ 
worth — cannot be ignored. It would certainly have received 
considerate attention at any time, for Congress was still full 
of the hope that the lands might produce a revenue that it 
could spend. With such a demand before it, Congress might well 
have been moved to insert in the basic law such guarantees as the 
buyers wanted. A third influence, and a sinister one, seems to have 
been exerted by the cupidity of certain public characters who 
wanted to share in whatever profits the speculation might pro- 
duce, and who saw no impropriety in their indulging in it while 
authorizing it. 

The eighteenth century was not one in which public men drew 
as sharp a line between public trust and private gain as now. In 
its last decade an absolute majority of the Georgia legislature was 


THE NATIONAL LAND SYSTEM 67 


bought over by the Yazoo speculators and bribed to betray their 
trust. The only active fields of investment were lands and public 
bonds, and nearly every man of prominence who had money took 
chances on the rise and fall of these. So common was this business 
that one of our recent historians has convinced himself that a 
corrupt or selfish interest was the chief factor giving stability to 
the Government of the United States after the adoption of the 
Constitution and that the real motive in the honorable assumption 
by the United States of the debt of the revolution was the desire 
of speculators to enrich themselves.’ Whatever the interpretation 
may be, the line of private conduct of public men ran through a 
shady twilight zone in 1787. The Ohio Associates were not able 
to get the votes for their act of government or their contract until 
they agreed to buy enough land to let in with them the Congress 
members who were jealous of their profits. With this assurance 
_ given, as Cutler tells us that it was, their course became smooth. 

The Ordinance of 1787 included a partition scheme, a plan of 
government, and a bill of rights. The first provided for the ulti- 
mate division of the Northwest into three or five States, as need 
might dictate. If three, the separating boundaries were to be the 
Wabash River and the meridian of Vincennes, and a meridian to 
be drawn through the mouth of the Great Miami River, corre- 
sponding with the present boundaries between Indiana and her 
neighbors. If five States should be admitted, then a line drawn 
east and west through the southern tip of Lake Michigan should 
cut off the two peninsulas that were eventually to become Michi- 
gan and Wisconsin. This was made an eternal and solemn com- 
pact among the States so far as Congress could compass it. 

So far as government was concerned the act provided for three 
progressive stages, the last of which should bring the State into the 
United States as a full participating member. England, too, at 
this same time and in the century ensuing was working upon 
an empire, and used three stages of similar import — with one 
marked exception that to-day distinguishes the British Empire 
from the American, since the fulfillment of statehood for British 
colonies has tended to leave them outside the Empire claiming 
independent rights, whereas the American State has become pro- 
gressively amalgamated with the nation in whose government it 
has an organic share. 


5 Charles A. Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), and Economia 
Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915). 


68 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


In the first stage, a territorial government was to be erected by - 
Congress with governor, secretary, and judges, competent to make 
the laws and administer them without consulting the wish of any 
settler. It was an autocratic establishment, to be justified only by 
its temporary character and the infancy of the social group. In 
the second stage, to be reached when there should be five thousand 
adult males in the territory, an elected legislature. was provided 
for, giving to the citizens that control over law-making and the 
purse that British peoples have so consistently demanded. When 
the total population reached sixty thousand, the Ordinance pro- 
vided that it should be competent to hold a constitutional con- 
vention, frame its own basic law, and enter the Union. No new 
State had been added to the thirteen as yet, and the future of the 
Union was shrouded in the secrecy of the Philadelphia Conven- 
tion when Congress sketched the future American colonial policy 
as firmly as though it thought it was legislating with full authority 
and assurance. . 

The bill of rights that was incorporated in the document shows 
resemblance to the similar pronunciamentos that appear in the 
Declaration of Independence and that are attached to many of the 
earliest State constitutions. The Ohio Associates doubtless wished 
to make the new world as attractive as possible to their prospec- 
tive customers. Some of the guarantees were separated in the text 
of the Ordinance as “‘articles of compact,” forever “unalterable, 
unless by common consent.” Others are scattered through the 
miscellaneous provisions. First of the unalterable rights was 
freedom of religion: ““No person, demeaning himself in a peaceable 
and orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode 
of worship or religious sentiments, in the said territories.” After 
this came the promise of uninterrupted right to the writ of habeas 
corpus, to jury trial, to compensation for property seized, and to 
freedom from ex post faco laws. “Religion, morality, and know- 
ledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of 
mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be en- 
couraged,” ran a sentence pregnant with meaning for the new 
communities. ‘The abolition of slavery which Jefferson had sought 
in vain to incorporate in the Ordinance of 1784 was now pledged. 
Equal distribution of property among brothers and sisters, heirs 
to the estate of intestates, was guaranteed, reflecting a reform that 
Jefferson again had fought for in Virginia and that was a protest 
against the Old World law of primogeniture. ‘The tottering Con- 


THE NATIONAL LAND SYSTEM 69 


gress provided, moreover, that the “said territory, and the States 
which may be formed therein, shall forever remain a part of this 
confederacy of the United States,” and insisted that they should 
be responsible for their share of the common debt, and refrain 
from questioning the full right of Congress to dispose of the title 
of the soil within their limits. 

The Ordinance of 1787 became a law by the unanimous vote of 
the eight States present in Congress on July 13, 1787. One in- 
dividual member voted no, but the delegations were a unit other- 
wise. Its significance as the basis of the American colonial policy 
gives importance to the fact that no word in the Articles of Con- 
federation seems to confer upon Congress the explicit power either 
to accept or dispose of a public estate; and that the method of its 
passage was irregular, since a mere majority of the thirteen States 
had no power to do any business under the Articles. On all 
ordinary matters two-thirds, or nine, were required; on amend- 
ments unanimity of the whole thirteen. This was the only great 
work that the Congress transacted under the Articles, and it was 
of dubious constitutionality. The Constitutional Convention at 
Philadelphia was moreover well upon its work of disregarding the 
Articles, framing a peaceful revolution, and ratifying a new Con- 
stitution by less than a unanimous vote. 

The requisite agreements had all been made by Cutler and 
Parsons before the Ordinance was passed. The “wrecking crew” 
that insisted on being let in with them, William Duer, Andrew 
Craigie, and the rest of the Scioto Associates, had been satisfied. 
On July 27 the ordinance of sale was passed authorizing the trans- 
fer of nearly seven million acres to the men who wanted them. 
The price agreed upon for all was the same — one dollar an acre, 
payable in continental money with a discount of one-third on 
account of the swampy or otherwise useless lands that might be 
scattered through the tract. It was arranged that 1,781,760 acres 
should go to the Ohio Associates, to be paid for with $500,000 in 
cash and the balance on survey. The Scioto group took option on 
4,901,480 acres, payable in six installments and divided the option 
into thirty shares which they allotted among themselves. 

The close interlocking of interests in the transaction is revealed 
by the fact that Winthrop Sargent, secretary of Congress, was also 
secretary of the Ohio Associates and acted with Cutler in com- 
pleting the purchase. Two of the new judges elected to go to the 
Northwest Territory were Parsons and Varnum, both of whom 


70 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


were directors of the Associates. And General Arthur St. Clair, - 
president of Congress, and a former western agent of the Penns at 
Pittsburgh, was not only a stockholder of the Associates but was 
chosen by his colleagues to be the first governor of the first terri- 
tory of the United States. Under Governor St. Clair, life and 
meaning were given to the political principles laid down in the 
Northwest Ordinance. 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE OLD NORTHWEST 


THE active mind and the careful erudition of the late B. A. Hins- 
dale have anticipated much of the work of the historian who pro- 
poses to follow up the Ordinance of 1787, and to trace the ex- 
tension of settlement into the Old Northwest.! Between 1787 
when the Ohio Associates’ contract was closed, and 1795 when 
“Mad” Anthony Wayne induced the Indians of the Wabash to 
sign a quittance to the lands along the Ohio River, a new colony 
was planted in the West. The conditions of frontier life that were 
already well established between the Ohio River and the Tennes- 
- see were extended across the former river to its Indian shore. And 
the mother country that had in 1783 agreed to the Great Lakes 
as a boundary between Canada and the United States, was per- 
suaded to keep the promise and withdraw her posts to her own 
dominions. On the southwest frontier, in the same years, Spain 
accepted the inevitable fact of American independence and com- 
plied in words, at least, with the description of boundary incor- 
porated in the Treaty of Versailles. Kentucky became a State, 
and Tennessee followed in 1796. The century was to end with what 
was new frontier in 1763 transformed into happy and prosperous 
farmlands; and with the pioneers of the earlier date now the grand- 
parents of pioneers who were thrusting their cabins towards De- 
troit, Mobile, and St. Louis. 

The site for the purchase of the Ohio Associates was fixed by 
elimination at a point on the Ohio River below the western limit 
of the Seven Ranges. Further upstream, there were no tracts 
large enough. Further down, the reserved lands of Virginia barred 
any sales between the Scioto and the Great Miami. Thither 
General Rufus Putnam was sent in the spring of 1788, as superin- 
tendent of the new settlement; and opposite Fort Harmar, which 
the army had placed in 1786 at the mouth of the Muskingum 
River, he determined to plant the first new town. He traveled 


1B. A. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest. The Beginnings of our Colonial System (1888); 
F. L. Paxson, ‘‘The Gateways of the Old Northwest,’’ in Michigan Pioneer and Historical 
Society, Collections, vol. xxxvut. R. G. Thwaites, “The Boundaries of Wisconsin,” in 
Wisconsin Historical Collections, vol. x1, contains a complete series of sketch maps showing 
the progress of political subdivision of the Northwest. 


12 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


west by the familiar road from Philadelphia, and on reaching the. 
Youghiogheny paused to have his carpenters cut timber and build 
boats for the river portion of the trip. It was a sentimental touch 
that gave to the boat that carried his group of pilgrims through 
the Ohio gateway to the Old Northwest, the sacred name of May- 
flower. 

On May 7, 1788, the first advance guard of the Ohio Associates 
arrived at the Muskingum, and started to build the town of Mari- 
etta. In the ensuing summer more adventurers joined them, and 
the farm cabins began to emerge among the clearings in the 
country behind. Governor St. Clair arrived in July to take up the 
thankless task of administering the Ordinance, creating counties, 
pacifying the Indians, and explaining to the settlers the reasons 
why it was dangerous to build their homes in the remote interior.’ 
In the following spring he moved his headquarters further down 
the river to the mouth of the Miami, where he built an army post, 
Fort Washington. He found a small community already on the 
ground as the result of the speculation of one John Cleves Symmes. 

The purchase of Symmes from Congress took place in the spring 
of 1788, and was on terms similar to those granted the Ohio Asso- 
ciates. For the sum of one dollar per acre, reduced by one third on 
account of probable bad lands, he contracted to buy an inverted 
wedge of land touching the Ohio between the mouths of the Great 
and Little Miamis, and expanding north into the Indian country. 
Neither of the boundary streams that determined his location was 
as well known as the southern tributary of the Ohio, the Licking, 
that has its mouth opposite the Symmes grant. Accordingly when 
it came to providing a name for the new venture, the fancy of the 
speculators was allowed full play. L for the Licking; os for its 
mouth; antz for the opposite shore; and ville for a termination; 
produced the name Losantiville, under which Symmes sent his 
first settlers west. Governor St. Clair did not like the name, and 
one of the virtues of his autocratic power was his ability to change 
it. The word of his preference was Cincinnati, a tribute to the 
society of which he was a member, and a suitable name for a region 
in which the activities of the officers of the Continental Army had 
such great influence. 


2 Dwight L. McCarty, The Territorial Governors of the Old Northwest. A Study in Terri- 
torial Administration (1910), is one of the few attempts to analyze American colonial 
policy; compare Max Farrand, Legislation of Congress for the Government of the Organizea 
Territories of the United States (1896), and David W. Parker, Calendar of Papers in Wash- 
ugton Archises relating to the Territories of the United States (1911). 


THE OLD NORTHWEST 73 


The population under the guidance of St. Clair grew slowly. 
In Kentucky across the river, where the Indian danger had been 
passed, the numbers grew from 73,000 in 1790 to 221,000 in 1800. 
The Northwest Territory had reached a maximum of only 51,000 
by the later date. There was slow expansion in the vicinity of 
Marietta and Cincinnati, and a sifting of settlers into the Seven 
Ranges. The Virginia and Connecticut Reserves showed small 
growth until well after 1790. 

The Virginia surveyors came into the valley of the Scioto River 
in 1790-1791 and ran lines that were gradually occupied by resi- 
dents of Kentucky holding Virginia warrants. It was more a 
speculation than a migration of soldiers claiming their own 
bounties. The warrants were bought and sold freely, and the pro- 
motors of the Scioto towns invited associates, with the offer of an 
in-lot, an out-lot, and one hundred acres as the standard allot- 
_ment. Between Wheeling and Limestone, on the Ohio River, the 
latter being opposite Maysville in Kentucky, an old Indian trail 
was developed as a road that paralleled the river. In 1796 Con- 
gress employed Ebenezer and Jonathan Zane of Wheeling to mark 
the route, so that the prospector might follow it with reasonable 
safety. The trail, generally known as Zane’s Trace, crossed the 
Scioto at an Indian village of Chillicothe, by the mouth of Paint 
Creek. On either side of it, as well as along the river itself, the 
Virginia warrant holders made their settlements. They took the 
name Chillicothe for their principal town, and before the decade 
ended St. Clair had reason to appreciate the solidarity of the 
Virginia frontier point of view as contrasted with that of his New 
England subjects. Two methods of land occupation clashed, and 
two political opinions. Even to-day, the student of Ohio politics 
needs to bear in mind the southern origin of many of the people of 
central Ohio. 

Moses Cleaveland, in the employ of the Connecticut Land 
Company, led a band of settlers to the Western Reserve of Con- 
necticut in the summer of 1796.* Part of the strip that Connecticut 
insisted on retaining when she made her cession was given as the 
Fire Lands, to the sufferers from British raids along the towns of 
Long Island Sound. The rest was passed over to a land company 
with so generous a grant that the company was disposed to claim 


3 The Tracts of the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the Fire Lands Pioneer of 
the Fire Lands Historical Society contain many volumes of documents and literary papers 
relating to the Connecticut Reserve. 


74 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


a right of government as well as the ownership of the land. In. 
surveying the tract a five-mile township was used instead of the 
six-mile area of Congress, and Moses Cleaveland selected a site at 
the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, on Lake Erie, as the place for 
their first main town. Until Connecticut surrendered to Congress 
the jurisdictional right over the Reserve in 1800, the settlers at 
Cleveland got along with few institutions of established govern- 
ment. Then they became a part of the Eastern Division of the 
Northwest Territory. 

Another early group that left its mark upon the virgin soil of the 
Old Northwest was made up of French emigrants who were per- 
suaded to seek a Garden of Eden in Ohio by the siren voice of Joel 
Barlow, an early American minor poet. Barlow was sent to France 
by the trustees for the Scioto Associates to dispose of lands that 
they had the right to buy from Congress. They had nothing but 
an option, which they never exercised; but in some manner that 
has never been fully explained, Barlow sold a tract of three million 
acres to a French Scioto Company that proceeded to retail farms 
to peasants and artisans who were willing to emigrate. In the 
spring of 1790 some six hundred of these arrived at Alexandria, 
Virginia, to the dismay of William Duer who was as nearly the 
moral head of the Scioto Associates in America, as they had. 
There were neither agents to meet them nor lands awaiting them. 
In great haste, as the prospect of hundreds of clamorous and 
deceived purchasers bore upon him, Duer arranged to buy a por- 
tion of the Ohio Associates’ lands for them. The Ohio group owed 
him money, for their own finances had nearly broken down, and 
he had carried them through their Marietta purchase. They now 
sold him for this debt, 196,544 acres on the Ohio River opposite 
the mouth of the Great Kanawha in the seventeenth range; and 
thither they fetched the Frenchmen, to found Gallipolis in Oc- 
tober, 1790. Rufus Putnam was engaged to build their huts, but 
no human could be found to fulfill the promises of Barlow’s pro- 
spectus or to provide profitable occupation for the skilled crafts- 
men who were among the emigrants. Colonel Duer failed in 1792 
before the titles at Gallipolis had been straightened out, the set- 
tlement withered away, and Congress for many sessions listened 
to the tale of disappointed hopes and fraud. Ultimately the suffer- 
ers were compensated in part, but Gallipolis remains a scar upon 
the surface of the Northwest. 

In every settlement west of the Ohio River there was an en- 


THE OLD NORTHWEST 75 


croachment upon the Indian lands, whose title was not fully 
quieted until 1795.4 When the Six Nations agreed to the second 
Treaty of Fort Stanwix, they yielded only a claim that the tribes 
living west of Pennsylvania did not admit. When the Lake Erie 
Indians confirmed the cession at Fort McIntosh, they surrendered 
what they did not occupy. Early in 1789 St. Clair called the tribes 
into council with him at Fort Harmar where these grants were 
reaffirmed, and the local tribes were brought unwillingly into the 
negotiation. Most of the Indian villages of importance were situ- 
ated along the Wabash and Maumee rivers, but certain of the 
tribes hunted freely over and were closely identified with the Ohio 
shore. These were the Miami, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Potawatami, 
Wea, and Delawares. After the long succession of conferences at 
Fort Harmar, for the tribes began to gather in September, 1788, 
and the treaty was not signed until January 9, 1789, all of the 
_tribes concerned had been brought into association with the 
United States. But there were at least three reasons why the sur- 
render of the right bank of the Ohio was not yet assured. 

In the first place the tribes had only a hazy notion of what a 
cession meant. ‘To them, air, wild game, running water, and the 
land were common property, over which no absolute or exclusive 
title was recognized. It was possible for tribesmen to attend a 
council and not realize from the interpretations of the commis- 
sioner’s speeches that they heard, that they were doing more than 
grant to the newcomers the same free usage that they enjoyed 
themselves. Without private property in land, they were unable 
to grasp the full significance of land to the whites until after they 
had seen the growth of farms and cabins. 

In the second place, the clan organization that prevailed over 
the tribes was less than national in character, and produced no 
government comparable to that of the whites, with power through 
recognized officers to bind all the citizens of the State. The Indian 
generally recognized the binding force of his personal promise. 
When he made his own mark at the foot of the treaty and received 
and enjoyed the gifts and entertainment that preceded it, he felt 
himself bound by it. But the Indian who did not sign felt himself 
free to repudiate the whole transaction and to assert his continuing 


4 Charles C. Royce has prepared a definitive series of maps of Indian land cessions which 
is printed in Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report, vol. xvi, 1896-1897, under the 
title ‘Indian Land Cessions in the United States.’’ With this, and the texts of the treaties 
in Charles J. Kappler, Indian Affairs. Laws and Treaties (1913), the student is in a position 
to check up on all details relating to cessions and migrations. 


76 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


privilege to enjoy what had formerly belonged to his tribe. When 
there was dissatisfaction with a treaty, the non-signatory braves 
were its natural leaders. 

In the third place, all of the Indians of the Northwest were 
aware that the new United States had been unsuccessful in secur- 
ing the possession of the full territory granted by England in 1783. 
The posts along the Great Lakes, from Niagara to Green Bay, 
were still in possession of English garrisons, and the factors of the 
British fur companies still did business as in the past. Every year 
the Indian hunters brought their furs to Detroit or other posts, 
and here exchanged them for guns, ammunition, scalping knives 
and hatchets, frying pans, needles, and blankets; and it is too 
much to expect of human nature that some of the agents did not 
remind them that the continued extension of the American settle- 
ments would destroy their game and force them to seek new 
homes. The papers of the British Board of Trade contain many 
references to the desire of the fur traders that the south side of the 
Great Lakes be never surrendered to the United States. And when 
England was in these years urged to fulfill the treaty, her reply 
was that the retention of the posts was in retaliation for the Amer- 
ican failure to allow her subjects to collect their pre-revolutionary 
debts. 

In spite of the treaties, the Ohio Indians remained along the 
Ohio, and brought danger to every outlying cabin. In 1790 
General Harmar was sent to the Maumee villages with the first of 
a long series of military expeditions whose purpose was to make 
such a demonstration as would overawe resistance, and quiet the 
border. But the commander could not control his own regulars 
and militiamen, was surprised in the autumn when on the Maumee 
near its source, and was driven back to Fort Washington in dis- 
order. ‘The following winter was one of terror in the Northwest, 
and the ensuing spring saw St. Clair himself in the field by order 
of President George Washington.® There was no successful prepa- 
ration for St. Clair’s maneuver, in either personnel or material. 
His plan was fundamentally sound, contemplating the erection of 
a chain of forts from Fort Washington to the Maumee, from which 
garrisons would be able to police the border. He built Fort Hamil- 


5 William H. Smith, The St. Clair Papers (1882); Charles J. Stillé, Major-General Anthony 
Wayne and the Pennsylvania Line in the Continental Army (1893), devotes its concluding 
chapters to Wayne’s western exploit. There are many local papers in the Publication: 
(originally the Quarterly) of the Ohio Archeological and Historical Society, and the 
Quarterly Publications of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio. 


THE OLD NORTHWEST 77 


ton and Fort Jefferson before winter set in, but was himself sur- 
prised while on a branch of the Wabash near the present western 
boundary of Ohio. Under the leadership of Little Turtle, whom 
the Shawnee Brave, Tecumseh, was serving as a scout, he was 
worried back to his seat of government. 

Anthony Wayne was Washington’s personal choice as com- 
mander to retrieve the situation and build up a sort of prestige for 
the United States among the tribes of the Northwest. Against the 
judgment of his advisers, for Wayne was mistrusted as rattle- 
brained by many of his associates, the President commissioned 
him to raise an army. This Wayne did near Pittsburgh, in the 
summer of 1792; but instead of hurrying his untrained force to the 
Maumee, he held them in camp and under discipline until in the 
spring of 1793 he was ready to take them down the Ohio to Fort 
Washington. Even here he was in no hurry, despite the nervous- 
ness of the border settlers. He marched north along St. Clair’s 
cordon of forts to a point some six miles beyond Fort Jefferson, 
where he erected Fort Greenville and wintered in 1793-1794. 

The Indian curiosity grew as Wayne led his legion into their 
midst. Under the discipline of Harmar and St. Clair they had been 
allowed to visit the camp of the army even while the war was on, 
and had been able to stroll among the tents and pilfer under the 
very eyes of the troops. With Wayne there was a sentinel that 
challenged the Indian at the limit of the camp, and either turned 
him back or escorted him under guard to the tent of the com- 
mander, where there was a parade of troops under arms. There 
was no straggling of men and no free pilfering. Instead of seeking 
a fight in 1793, Wayne was content to march a detachment to the 
site of St. Clair’s defeat and build and garrison there a new post 
that bore the significant name of Fort Recovery. In the summer of 
1794 Wayne took to the open. 

A certain Major Campbell, of the English establishment, com- 
manded at Detroit, and watched the approach of Wayne with as 
much curiosity as did the Indians. He warned the American 
officer that a further penetration might bring him into trouble; to 
which Wayne replied not only with stern words, but with an ad- 
vance to the Maumee, where the Auglaize enters, and with the 
construction there of Fort Defiance. In August he moved on down 
the Maumee, towards the head of Toledo Bay where was a British 
station, but before he arrived there the Indians blocked his track. 
Some forty miles below Fort Defiance, where a tornado had left a 


78 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


natural breastwork of trees and brush, Little Turtle marshaled 
his braves. There may have been some English and Canadians 
fighting with him; Wayne at least thought so. It was as unusual, 
and as little in accord with the ordinary tactics of Indian warriors, 
for them to lie quietly behind cover and await attack as it would 
have been for them to enter into a pitched battle with an en- 
trenched enemy. On August 20, 1794, they were totally defeated, 
their picked warriors were slain, and the demoralized survivors 
were brought to the frame of mind that both Harmar and St. 
Clair had previously sought to establish. With the campaign over, 
Wayne marched without hindrance to the source of the Maumee, 
and there erected Fort Wayne. 

The Treaty of Greenville was concluded by the conqueror on 
August 3, 1795. Little Turtle, of the Miami, who had now had his 
fill of warfare with the whites, became an influence towards con- 
ciliation and peace; and the numerous tribes whose homes between 
the Wabash and the Ohio were threatened by the American influx, 
accepted the unavoidable recognition of American title. The 
boundary line that was here established started on the Ohio shore 
opposite the mouth of the Kentucky River; thence it ran east of 
north to Fort Recovery, at which point it turned sharply to the 
east, running through central Ohio to the head of the Cuyahoga, 
and down this stream to Lake Erie. Fort Wayne, a little beyond 
the boundary, became a military post, but it was not greatly 
needed, for while the generation that fought the Battle of Fallen 
Timbers dominated, the Old Northwest enjoyed a lasting peace. 


CHAPTER IX 
THE WESTERN BOUNDARIES 


Witx “‘dry decency and cold civility,” the English Government 
allowed John Adams, minister from the United States, to reside 
in London for the four years after the signing of the Treaty of 
Versailles. But when he gave up as hopeless the task of negotiat- 
ing a satisfactory treaty of commerce with that country and took 
his departure in 1788, he had nothing to show for his efforts; and 
in the audience of departure King George III bluntly informed 
him that when the United States fulfilled its part of the treaty, 
he would execute his. In vain Adams endeavored to procure the 
evacuation of the western posts. In formal arguments, he was 
ever confronted with counterclaims regarding the British debts, 
for the States had disregarded the recommendations of the treaty 
that British subjects be allowed to recover their pre-war debts, 
and that the laws discriminating against the Tories be made less 
onerous. If Adams could have gone behind the claims of unpaid 
bills and an unfulfilled treaty, he would have found in the papers 
of the British offices a multitude of protests from British mer- 
chants and subjects residing in Canada, directed against the trans- 
fer of the region of the Great Lakes to the United States at any 
time. The British commandant at Niagara, in 1789, acted in this 
spirit and refused to let Americans even view the falls, alleging 
that “too many people have seen the falls already.”’ The British 
debts, however, were a real grievance, and a better pretext. So 
long as the United States showed no sign of being able to safe- 
guard itself or to protect its border population, there was small 
chance that the English side of the treaty would be carried out. 
The campaign of Wayne played a part in solving the diplomatic 
tangles of the United States which was nearly as important as the 
part played in settling tangles of the border. Twice in the autumn 
of 1794, and each time in a frontier cause, the new republic showed 
a spirit to defend itself. The large army of militia that was marched 
to western Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Insurrection, 
indicated a determination to enforce the power of Congress to 
“lay and collect” taxes. Wayne’s well-disciplined advance created 
in every month after 1793 a stronger disposition to respect the 


80 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


military capacity of the United States. His erection of Fort De- 
fiance, in the first week of August, 1794, was a gesture whose 
meaning the British officers at Detroit could not mistake. The 
crushing victory at Fallen Timbers broke at once the Indian power 
of independent resistance, and the British disposition to give them 
aid and encouragement. John Jay, whom Washington sent to 
London in the summer of 1794 to make a peace that could be main- 
tained, found in the affairs along the northern border almost the 
only topic upon which he could make headway. 

The outbreak of the French Revolution, and the general Euro- 
pean war that came with it, brought to a crisis the question of 
securing an understanding with Great Britain. The popular dis- 
position in the United States was to support a war against England 
regardless of American condition to maintain it. The alliance with 
France, concluded in 1778, called for American aid in case France 
should be attacked by her enemies, and the French Republic 
interpreted the war as such an attack. It would have been easiest 
for Washington to place himself at the head of this feeling of 
popular sympathy, and plunge the country into warfare on the 
side of France. Nowhere would such a decision have been more 
popular than throughout the new settlements, where men re- 
sponded readily to the ideas of liberty and democracy. But it 
might well have been suicide, for there was neither army nor navy; 
the militia was without organization; and in the spring of 1793 
when Citizen Genét arrived in Philadelphia bearing the suggestion 
that America aid her ally, it had not been established that Amer- 
ica could either enforce her own domestic laws or suppress a few 
thousand resentful savages on her border. Not yet in possession 
of her own conceded limits, the United States was hardly in a 
position to bid defiance to Great Britain. 

A wave of sympathy with France poured over the United 
States. The course of Genét to the seat of government from 
Charleston, where he landed, was like a triumphal progress; with 
civic banquets, denunciation of Britain, and flattery of France. 
The democratic clubs of France became the model for political 
clubs in the United States; and to these flocked the younger men, 
east or west, who were outside the governing class and were dis- 
posed to believe that the friends of Washington contemplated, if 
not a monarchy and another King George, at least a centralized 
government in which State and popular liberty would disappear. 

Genét proceeded to outfit privateers in American ports, to prey 


THE WESTERN BOUNDARIES 81 


upon British commerce, and to commission roving characters in 
the western settlements to organize raids upon the Spanish ter- 
ritory. The Secretary of State, Jefferson, was a pronounced 
Francophile, even though he yielded to the pressure of the Cabinet 
and wrote a famous proclamation of neutrality which was issued 
April 22, 1793. By order of Washington Genét was soon disavowed 
as minister from France on account of his transgressions of neu- 
trality; but he stayed in the United States and found a refuge with 
a family of Washington’s opponents, where he married a daughter 
and bred a line of sturdy American descendants. 

The one sure thing before Washington was the need for peace; 
and England itself was making this almost impossible by a rough 
and autocratic administration of maritime law as it affected the 
rights of neutrals. The mission of Jay was to prevent a war and to 
give a sign to the uneasy people that Washington was not sitting 
without action in the crisis. Jay found the British reluctant to 
make any commercial treaty with the United States. Before the 
Revolution, the colonies as parts of the British dominion had en- 
joyed a large measure of the trade in supplies with other British 
colonies, as well as with England direct. Outsiders were excluded 
by the commercial system from any part in this trade; but it 
missed the attention of the Americans that success in the Revolu- 
tion would place them outside the protected circle, and deprive 
them of free access to the markets, especially those in the West 
Indies upon which they had long depended for sugar, molasses, 
and coined money. As an independent nation the United States 
asked England to admit it to the favors that only British colonies 
ordinarily enjoyed, and was vexed when England declined to grant 
the request. Jay could get no commercial privileges that Congress 
regarded as worth having, and when his treaty of November 19, 
1794, was under consideration, the French party regarded it as 
humiliating and empty. 

The treaty, however, accomplished the basic thing; it pledged 
“‘a firm, inviolable and universal peace, and a true and sincere 
friendship,’ between the two countries that were tottering on the 
verge of war. And in its second article the British sovereign 
promised to “withdraw all his troops and garrisons from the posts 
and places within the boundary lines assigned by the treaty of 
peace to the United States.”’ This was to be accomplished by 
June 1, 1796, and in consideration for it (or for any treaty at all) 
the United States accepted the responsibility for and agreed te 


82 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


pay such debts to British subjects as could be shown to have been 
destroyed by legal impediments put in the road of their collection 
by the States. 

The British evacuation of the northwest posts took place as 
agreed. In the summer of 1796 Wayne’s army pushed the military 
frontier of the United States from the Maumee line of Fort De- 
fiance and Fort Wayne to Detroit, when they took over that post 
from the retiring British. It is Hinsdale’s belief that England’s 
‘retention of the posts, so calamitous in results to the growing 
Western settlements, was largely due to a lingering hope that the 
young republic would prove a failure, and to a determination to 
share in the expected spoil. The fact is, neither England nor Spain 
regarded the Treaty of Paris [1783] as finally settling the destiny 
of the country west of the mountains.” The first critical period 
in American history was ended when the States held together long 
enough to frame the Constitution and enter upon a “more perfect 
Union”; the second when the new government managed to en- 
force its laws against resistance, to keep the peace on its borders, 
and to procure the fulfillment of its rights to territory. The diffi- 
culty that was resolved along the frontier of the Great Lakes in 
1795 and 1796 was paralleled by a similar controversy, and similar 
success upon the frontier of the Gulf of Mexico. 

“The Mississippi,” wrote an American Secretary of State, “‘is 
. .. the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable 
rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one stream.” In a cen- 
tury in which roads were non-existent, and wheeled vehicles an 
object of curiosity, the river constituted a highway that shaped 
the course of colonization and life. On the seaboard the dominance 
of the rivers determined the type of colonial life. Once the settler 
passed beyond the Appalachian watershed, the natural highways 
carried him readily towards the West; but instead of breaking up 
any possible community of interest into as many river valleys as 
there were, the western streams picked up the component parts of 
a newer solidarity, and as they merged into the Ohio and Missis- 
sippi, built up a powerful and dominant idea. France before 1763, 
and Spain thereafter, thought of the Mississippi system as a 
natural means of bringing to New Orleans the profits of the Indian 
trade of the interior of the continent. The American settlements 
in the Ohio Valley produced a contestant for those profits, and a 


1 Andrew C. McLaughlin, ‘“‘The Western Posts and the British Debts,’’ in American 
Historical Association, Report (1894). 


THE WESTERN BOUNDARIES 83 


rival to dispute with the owners of New Orleans the contro! of the 
traffic.” 

At the date of the peace negotiations in Paris, 1781-1783, there 
were western settlements progressing under the grants of Virginia 
and North Carolina, and many of the more remote counties in 
Pennsylvania were upon the tributaries of the Upper Ohio. Be- 
yond these colonies was the Indian tract, that France and Spain 
would willingly have kept Indian forever. Beyond this were the 
outposts of the fur traders. The English posts on the Great Lakes 
were matched by French and Spanish posts at St. Louis and along 
the Gulf Shore from New Orleans to Pensacola. St. Louis was a 
new dependency of New Orleans upon which the trading houses 
placed special reliance for the management of the fur trade of the 
Missouri Valley. 

No serious attempt was made at Paris to carry the boundary of 
the United States across the Mississippi, or to contest the control 
of the town at the mouth of the Missouri, on its western bank. 
Pierre Laclede, of a famous New Orleans firm of fur traders, was 
responsible for the selection of the site, and Chouteau, his employe, 
for the planting of the post. In the winter of 1763-1764, they 
made their establishment, in time for many of the French residents 
in the Illinois country to cross the Mississippi upon receiving news 
of the cession of the east bank to England. Most of the French on 
the Wabash, or elsewhere in the Illinois country, were indifferent 
to the change made by the Treaty of Paris. Those who disliked it 
swelled the population of St. Louis, which was after all a better 
site for such a post than any that had been chosen east of the 
Mississippi. For the rest of the century, as the abundant manu- 
scripts in the Missouri Historical Society show, there was con- 
tinuous trade upon the Mississippi. Yearly the supplies of the 
traders were worked up against the current, in long keel-boats, 
and as often the bales of fresh furs collected by the Indian hunters 
were floated downstream to seek a European market from New 
Orleans. The traffic involved no trespass upon the territory of the 
United States, but the claim of the Spanish to own the Mississippi 
River on whose bosom it was carried was a constant exasperation. 
The grievance was made more burdensome because of the strategic 


2 Frederic A. Ogg, The Opening of the Mississippi (1904); James A. Robertson, Louisiana 
under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States (1911); F. J. Turner, ‘Origin of 
Genet’s Projected Attack,’ in American Historical Association, Report, 1896; Archibald 
Henderson, ‘‘Isaac Shelby and the Genet Mission,” in Mississippi Valley Historical Re 
view, vol. VI. 


84 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


position of Spain along the Gulf of Mexico, and her refusal to 
recognize the boundary of the United States established here by 
the Treaty of Versailles. 

A secret article in the preliminaries of peace between England 
and the United States, signed in 1782, furnished the pretext upon 
which Spain based her retention of part of the southwest corner of 
the United States. The open articles placed the boundary at the 
thirty-first parallel, but it was secretly understood that if Great 
Britain should retain West Florida after the conclusion of her 
peace with Spain, the boundary should be “‘a line drawn from the 
mouth of the river Yassous [Yazoo], which is about one hundred 
miles further north. Spain felt somewhat defrauded by this quiet 
bargain at her expense, and having possession of the country in 
question, did without the law. Her post at Pensacola was within 
her unquestioned limits; likewise was the one at New Orleans; but 
above Mobile and above New Orleans, at Natchez, and elsewhere 
she held on to military posts within the defined boundaries of the 
United States. Holding both banks of the Mississippi at its 
mouth, she was in a position to render worthless the agreement 
between England and the United States that the navigation of the 
river “from its source to the ocean” should be free and open to 
the subjects and citizens of both. It was this control, and the re- 
sulting power to lay an embargo upon all western commerce, that 
irritated the western Americans more than the constant traf- 
ficking between the Spanish posts and the southwestern Indians. 
Continuously from 1783 to 1795 there were attempts to reach an 
agreement upon the status of the Mississippi and the Southwest. 

In the earlier period of the negotiation, while Jay was in charge 
of the foreign relations under the old Congress, it was supposed 
that it might be safe to close the Mississippi to American trade. 
Spain showed a disposition to allow the United States a treaty of 
commerce, opening some of her colonial ports to the United States, 
in return for this price. Both Jay and Washington believed that it 
would be another generation before the actual needs of the western 
settlements would include the river. But Congress failed to ap- 
prove the proposals, and the negotiation lapsed; not, however, until 
a rumor of it leaked out and penetrated to the Kentucky towns, 
where Brigadier General James Wilkinson was already exciting the 
western mind with a vision of profitable foreign trade.® 


3 The dubious career of James Wilkinson has aroused much controversy, and the doubtful 
esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries was responsible for his publication of 
Memoirs of my own Times (1816), an interesting but unreliable autobiography. 


THE WESTERN BOUNDARIES 85 


The Spanish administrators at New Orleans feared that the 
ready westerners might descend the river and take by force that 
which the policy of Spain would not concede. They insured against 
_ this catastrophe by allowing favored traders from upstream to 
violate the law. It was no novelty for infractions of the law to be 
sources of revenue for Spanish colonial officials. They also built 
up a pension list of important Americans in the Kentucky and 
Tennessee country, paying them private sums of money to secure 
friendship and the avoidance of overt acts against Spain. Many 
frontiersmen saw no sin in letting Spain pay them to obey the law. 

The free initiative of the border, that worried Miro at New 
Orleans, worried Washington as well after he became President. 
The bond of Union was still slight, and among the settlements 
that had been refused admission and equality by the old Congress, 
there was restiveness that countenanced talk of separation and 
queries as to whether the Union was worth while. Vermont had 
maintained a State since 1777, without recognition. In Kentucky 
and Tennessee statehood had been demanded and denied. No- 
where was Washington’s proclamation of neutrality defied with 
more zeal than in the new settlements where France was already 
intriguing to get filibusters to march against Spain. Simultane- 
ously with the mission of Jay to England, and in much the same 
spirit, Washington made a final effort to get from Spain some 
action that would allay the passions of the West. 

The details of the negotiation of the Treaty of San Lorenzo el 
Real, signed October 27, 1795, by Thomas Pinckney and Godoy, 
the Prince of the Peace, were vexatious and dilatory. Procrastina- 
tion and evasion were used to fight off either compliance with 
Pinckney’s demands, or rupture of the negotiation. Not until the 
American minister had given up the task and demanded his pass- 
ports could he procure action. And then it appears to have been 
due, not to the strength of his case, but to a change in Spanish 
policy. The gossip that had reached Spain about the Jay treaty 
sounded as though the treaty was to be rejected by the Senate, 
and a war with England entered upon. Spain, too, was about to 
declare war on England. The desirability of an ally whose good 
will might prevent a British march from Canada across the North- 
west against St. Louis and New Orleans, was obvious. Accord- 
ingly three days after Pinckney broke off the discussion, he signed 
a treaty in which Spain agreed to the boundary of the thirty-first 
parallel, promised to remove any garrisons stationed north of it, 


86 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


pledged the free navigation of the whole Mississippi River, and 
granted for three years a privilege to the up-river exporters to 
deposit their wares at New Orleans, and thence export them. 

The situation in Europe changed almost the moment the treaty 
was signed, and Spain lost her interest in placating the clamorous 
elements in the United States. When American commissioners 
were sent to Natchez to run the boundary line they found delay 
until 1798. In this year the line was staked out, and with its 
establishment the United States came into full possession of its 
territorial limits, and passed out of the second critical period of 
its existence. 


CHAPTER X 
THE FIRST NEW STATES 


GrorGE WASHINGTON laid down the office of President of the 
United States in 1797 with the new government a going institu- 
tion. He had secured possession of the whole American territory, 
sketched a policy of international relationship, proved that it was 
possible to enforce the laws as well as to make them, and breathed 
into the dry bones of constitutional provision the spark of life. 
He had as well carried out the novel policy of imperial develop- 
ment sketched in the Ordinance of 1787, and signed the bills ad- 
mitting to full brotherhood in the Union the three new States of 
Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. No one of these was a public 
land State, for in none did the United States own the title to any 
of the soil. Only one, the last, had even been a territory in the 
sense of the Ordinance. But their admission was an earnest 
of the adherence of the Republic to the principle of free self- 
government. What the old Congress promised in the Ordinance 
and described as an eternal compact among the States, the new 
Congress reénacted August 7, 1791, when it adopted the Ordinance 
as a statute under the Constitution. 

Vermont is associated with the western frontier only by a con- 
scious effort of imagination, but its course of development, like 
the later course of Maine, ran true to the typical process of the 
border. It was a frontier of the Revolutionary period, and pos- 
sessed a de facto independence as old as that of the thirteen States 
that were inside the Confederation. The long refusal of Congress, 
or rather inability, to admit Vermont helps to explain many 
strains of thought that pervaded the rest of the frontier and filled 
the hearts of Washington and Jefferson with a fear that the 
Union might not be maintained. From 1777 until 1791 Vermont 
maintained a republican form of government under a constitution, 
and asked without response for admittance. 

The reasons for both the birth of Vermont and the reluctance to 
admit it as a State are to be found in the conflict of jurisdiction 
among Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York. The 
northern boundary of the Massachusetts settlement, fixed at the 
Merrimac River, was subject to a dispute in which that province 


88 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


claimed to run the line from the source of the river, and New 
Hampshire contended for a line of demarcation leaving the Mer- 
rimac at Pawtucket Falls, where is its most southern bend. There 
was involved the southern half of both New Hampshire and Ver- 
mont. While the matter was still in controversy both colonies 
granted lands to settlers in the area of contest. Their dispute was 
settled by the crown in 1741, when New Hampshire was given the 
whole region north of the present boundary of Massachusetts. 

The award to New Hampshire left undetermined the old claim 
of New York to extend to the Connecticut River in the country 
north of Massachusetts, and New York took the aggressive as 
claimant against New Hampshire now that Massachusetts was 
eliminated. The governor of New Hampshire encouraged the 
settlement of the area beyond the Connecticut, and sold freely 
rectangular townships six miles square, for the purpose of strength- 
ening his title to the land by actual occupation. The New Hamp- 
shire grants thus became a community whose peaceful existence 
depended upon a victory of New Hampshire over New York. In 
1764 this hope faded, for the king recognized the title of New York 
as extending to the Connecticut River. The victor province in- 
vited the occupants of the soil, who had bought their titles from 
the illegal claimant, New Hampshire, to buy them again from it. 
It was hard enough to make frontier farmers buy their land once; 
to make them do it twice was beyond the possible. The New 
Hampshire Grants denied the claim of New York, set up an inde- 
pendence that New York was not able to break down before the 
Revolution began, and made a constitution under the name of 
Vermont when the other States made theirs. Whether Vermont 
was a State or not, the ““Green Mountain Boys” played a useful 
part on the northern frontier during the Revolution. 

The appeal of Vermont for admission came before Congress not 
far from the time when the settlements of the Blue Grass region 
of Kentucky were being planted by Judge Henderson’s Transy]l- 
vania Company, and were asking similar treatment. The Vermont 
constitution of 1777 copied a Pennsylvania provision for a council 
of censors and periodic revision. Neither New York nor Virginia 
was yet ready for partition, however, and the life of Congress was 
too precarious to make it wise to run the risk of alienating either 
or both of these great constituents. In 1786 a second constitution 
was made; but still the requisite nine States could not be got to 
vote for admission. In 1790, New York at last gave consent to the 


THE FIRST NEW STATES 89 


alteration of its boundaries, and released the land between Lake 
Champlain and the Connecticut. Congress thereupon, by act of 
February 18, 1791, declared that after the following March 4, 
~ Vermont should be a member of the United States. It had a few 
days earlier given a like permission to Kentucky. 

The Kentucky settlements sprang to life along the middle 
border on the eve of the Revolution. Lord Dunmore’s War, with 
its decisive victory in 1774 stimulated the advance out of Pennsyl- 
vania and Virginia into the West and gave new zest to speculation 
in land titles and colonial projects. In the following year Hender- 
son made his attempt to buy lands directly from the Indian 
owners, and was sharply rebuffed by Virginia. At the time of the 
Henderson settlement there were already a few Virginians on the 
ground with prior claims as squatters. James Harrod brought in a 
group by way of the Ohio River and the Falls, and settled in the 
Kentucky Valley in 1774. Harrodsburg was the center of Virginia 
influence over the Blue Grass country before Daniel Boone estab- 
lished Boonesboro for Henderson’s associates in 1775. The Boones- 
boro Convention that appealed to Congress for independent state- 
hood was matched by a Harrodsburg Convention that memorial- 
ized Virginia for an extension of government by that State. Con- 
gress was inactive, but Virginia, at the end of 1776, organized a 
Kentucky County covering the whole area that she was already 
disposed to consider as a future State. Clark gave peace to the 
new county in the following years, and protected with his expedi- 
tion the planting of Louisville at the Falls of the Ohio. 

The new western settlements that were made in the ten years 
after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis were mostly directed to 
Kentucky County, with the Ohio River on its northern side, and 
the Cumberland near its southern. The great gateways at the 
Ohio Forks and Cumberland Gap let the settlers through. The 
hostility of the Indian tribes on the right bank of the Ohio re- 
tarded settlement there and repelled the pioneer invader. The 
opposition of the Cherokee, and the violent altercation between 
North Carolina and the followers of John Sevier concerning the 
State of Franklin, discouraged much emigration to the country 
south of the Cumberland. The friendly limestone soil of the Blue 
Grass invited occupation, and the parent State, Virginia, held out 
hopes of freedom and opportunity. 

Here came James Wilkinson in 1784, with experience earned in 
the Revolution and with an eager mind roving over all the pos- 


90 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


sibilities of the future for the Ohio Valley. Permanent attachment 
to Virginia was only one of the solutions; admission as a State 
was second; an inland confederacy linked together by the Missis- 
sippi River was a third; and there may have been another that 
contemplated an alliance with some foreign power that might 
secure both personal prestige and a market for the surplus produce 
of the farms. 

Kentucky assumed self-consciousness at the moment when Con- 
gress was debating the question of a Spanish treaty and an agree- 
ment to close the Mississippi for a term of years. The garbled 
report of this that reached the West strengthened the suspicion 
that Congress might neither admit the West nor treat it fairly. 
The long-denied claims of Vermont provided ammunition for the 
advocate of a more local self-determination. The illicit profits of 
the river trade, that the compliant Spanish administrators allowed 
to Wilkinson and many of his friends, kept them interested in 
their immediate gains. The statehood movement ripened, but 
ripened slowly even after Virginia in 1786 stated the terms upon 
which she was ready to recognize Kentucky independence. 

Three times more, before the decade ended, Virginia repeated 
her tender of freedom to her colony. Each time something oc- 
curred to keep Kentucky from taking effective action under it. In 
1789 the Federal Constitution added a new safeguard to the State 
whose section aspired to separate autonomy. Under the Articles of 
Confederation, admission was authorized by vote of nine States, 
with no further requirement. Under the Constitution admission 
was based upon simple act of Congress, with the proviso that no 
State should be forced to contribute of its land to any new State 
without its consent. Even Congress added its authorization and 
fixed a date at which Kentucky should become a State before the 
tenth of the Kentucky conventions in her statehood series met at 
Danville and framed a constitution. 

There were plenty of guides for the craftsmen of the new State. 
Both Delaware and New Hampshire had just completed revisions 
of their revolutionary constitutions, and in Pennsylvania an upris- 
ing of the newer counties had dominated in a constitutional con- 

1 Archibald Henderson, “Creative Forces in American Expansion,” in American His- 
torical Review, vol. xtv. Francis Newton Thorpe, A Constitutional History of the American 
People, 1776-1850 (1898), fully appreciates the meaning of the American process of con- 
stitution making; the texts of the various constitutions are most easily available in his 


Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters and other Organic Laws of the States, Ter- 
ewories, and Colonies now or heretofore forming the United States of America (1909). 


THE FIRST NEW STATES 91 


vention of elected delegates. The Virginia constitution of 1776 
was still foremost in western minds as representing an advanced 
view of democratic right. —The men who counted for most in the 
Kentucky convention were Virginia born; and in the constitution 
they made, may be seen the flowering of the Virginia spirit in a 
frontier soil. It was different from the Virginia bloom, as that of 
Virginia differed from that of Old England. It founded its elec- 
torate on manhood suffrage. George Nicholas, who probably 
drafted the document, showed his belief in direct representation by 
resigning his seat when he changed his mind upon a basic point, 
and by returning to his constituents for a fresh election. Most of 
the Kentucky delegates, when in the Virginia convention, had 
voted against the ratification of the Constitution of the United 
States; now that they had in sight a full participation in that 
Union, the spirit of national pride began to grip them. Before the 
date June 1, 1792, had arrived, at which Kentucky was to become 
a State, the constitution was in force, the State government had 
been installed, and senators and representatives were ready to take 
up their work at Philadelphia in the national Congress. They had 
perhaps one hundred thousand constituents with homes in or near 
the Blue Grass. 

Tennessee became the sixteenth State in 1796, after a vexatious 
period of youth and adolescence. Its earliest settlements went 
back to the Watauga district, and the exodus from North Carolina 
after the Battle of the Alamance. The parallel tributaries that 
flow southwest and make up the Tennessee River drain a series of 
fertile valleys that attracted a small but consistent immigration in 
spite of the adverse claims of the Cherokee Indians and the atti- 
tude of North Carolina. So many of the newcomers came from the 
Virginia valleys, bringing with them a preconceived distrust of 
North Carolina that the heroes of the winning of this West had a 
special aversion to the state of dependence that the parent State 
maintained. In 1784 North Carolina ceded the western country to 
Congress, withdrawing the cession before the year expired. In 
1789, after silencing the aspirations of the State of Franklin, the 
cession was repeated on terms that Congress could accept. 

There were no public lands to be transferred to Congress, but 
the temporary jurisdiction over the people made necessary an act 
for their government. North Carolina specified in the cession that 
the guarantees spread over the Northwest by the Ordinance of 
1787 should be allowed to her dependents. Congress, therefore, 


92 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


on May 26, 1790, created the territory south of the Ohio River 
for the benefit of Tennessee, and installed a government, sister to 
that which St. Clair was directing from his new seat at Cincinnati. 
In addition to Tennessee, the territory embraced the alleged strip 
ceded by South Carolina, and, in theory, the tract south of the 
Yazoo line. But since Spain was still in possession of the last, it 
gave small concern to Governor William Blount, whom Washing- 
ton commissioned as first executive of the territory. There were 
not over 25,000 settlers in the new government when it was estab- 
lished; six years later when admitted to the Union it was alleged 
. that the population of 77,262 was acquired only by counting in 
transients who were obliged to pass through eastern Tennessee on 
their way to Cumberland Gap and Kentucky. 

The three districts that nature had created for the State of Ten- 
nessee made their impression upon the mind of the prospective 
commonwealth from its beginning. Eastern Tennessee is a region 
of parallel valleys, with high elevation, and with economic and 
agricultural resources different from those of the more level coun- 
try on either side. Small farmers of the frontier type built it up; 
and in backwaters where there was no easy approach to any 
market, some of their descendants still remain and live the life of 
the eighteenth century in the twentieth. ‘“‘Our contemporary 
ancestors,”’ as they have been called, make it possible to visualize 
the life that was characteristic of the whole frontier in its earliest 
phase, with the exception of the aggressive spirit that speedily 
changed the face and prospect of the more favored regions. From 
the stagnant recesses of the mountains where economic develop- 
ment came slowly if at all, the pushing members of each succeed- 
ing generation have worked themselves out; leaving behind the 
dull ones and the unfortunates, whose retarded colonies are 
sprinkled among the valleys south of Pennsylvania. 

Knoxville, founded on the Tennessee River in 1789, was at once 
the seat of eastern Tennessee and the capital of the territory. 
Here in 1794 the earliest legislature met, the population having 
grown enough to authorize it. And two years later, after the terri- 
torial census had been taken, here the convention met to frame a 
constitution and demand that Congress recognize Tennessee as a 
State. 

Middle and western Tennessee, the other two districts, repre- 
sent somewhat different geographic influences, that were followed 
by economic and social deviation. The middle region lies west of 


THE FIRST NEW STATES 93 


the mountains and is dominated by the Cumberland River. In an 
agricultural way, it partakes of the character that the Blue Grass 
region of Kentucky possesses. It was settled first by James Rob- 
ertson’s colony at Nashville, and expanded as a region of planta- 
tions. Slaves were profitable here, as they were not in eastern 
Tennessee, and the resulting system of slave agriculture bred a 
different social atmosphere. In western Tennessee, the tract actu- 
ally west of the Tennessee River and east of the Mississippi, the 
Chickasaw Indians remained in possession through the first two 
decades of the nineteenth century. Ultimately the cotton crop 
came to control the interests of western Tennessee, and Memphis, 
with its strategic position on the high bluffs of the Mississippi (the 
first good high ground above Vicksburg), became a gateway for 
the extension of an economic imperialism over the country still 
further west. But in the end of the seventeenth century, when 
_the territory south of the Ohio was transforming itself into the 

State of Tennessee, middle Tennessee was the remote frontier; 
west Tennessee was Indian country, and eastern ‘Tennessee was 
the center of political activity. 

On the frontier of the Tennessee River, Blount had to deal with 
Indian danger and alien intrigue, somewhat as St. Clair was 
forced to meet them on the Ohio in the same years. But no en- 
gagement with the Cherokee stands out with the strategic signifi- 
cance of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and no treaty had the far- 
reaching effects of that at Greenville. Sevier and Robertson, lead- 
ers in the earliest stirrings of society, remained the prominent 
leaders through the Indian dangers and the political discussions. 
An element that was lacking in the Northwest Territory appeared 
in Tennessee in the chance for dubious speculation in Spanish 
profits. In Tennessee, more than elsewhere, the bond of interest in 
the United States was slight, and the temptation to make some- 
thing out of the international situation was strong. We do not 
know quite the extent or the manner in which Blount and Sevier, 
and others of their associates, like Wilkinson in Kentucky, took 
profits out of Spain. Some of the leaders were kept on the pay 
roll at New Orleans; others, like Clark and Blount, were ready 
to accept pay from France for a filibustering attack on Spain. 
After Tennessee became a State and Blount a senator, enough 
evidence appeared to warrant his impeachment. There was 
no conviction, since the Senate had already expelled him, and 
doubted, moreover, whether a senator was liable to impeachment. 


94 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


In the case of Kentucky, Congress declared that it might be- 
come a State on a given date in the future, and Kentucky pro- 
ceeded to make a constitution, without outside oversight. In Ten- 
nessee there was no such recognition until a delegation appeared at 
Philadelphia, reporting that a constitution had been made and 
that congressmen were ready to take their seats. ‘Thereupon there 
was debate upon the propriety of the formation of a State with no 
more authority than the general provisions of the Ordinance of 
1787, and there were members of Congress who would gladly have 
disciplined the new commonwealth for its presumption. But since 
most of these were of the party that had lost its grip upon the 
West, and even upon Congress, they were unable to delay action. 
On June 1, 1796, by an act effective at once, Tennessee was de- 
clared a member of the Union. Sevier, who had been the territorial 
delegate in Congress, was governor, Blount was one of the first 
senators, and a Nashville lawyer, Andrew Jackson by name, 
became the earliest representative. 

Times were changing, when Tennessee entered as the sixteenth 
State. Part of the West was no longer sheer frontier. In central 
Kentucky there were signs of stability and wealth, as there were 
in western Virginia and western Pennsylvania. Local leaders had 
begun to grow on local roots, and frontier points of view had 
gained coherent spokesmen. The ubiquitous printer had made his 
way across the mountains, with his irrepressible news sheets. The 
Pittsburgh Gazette (July 29, 1786) was the first west of the moun- 
tains. This was followed by John Bradford’s Kentucke Gazette 
(August 11, 1787), and by William Maxwell’s Centinel of the North- 
Western Territory, that made its appearance at Cincinnati Novem- 
ber 11, 1793. ‘The historian turns to the early issues of these news- 
papers in vain, when he hopes for details upon the settlement of 
the communities that maintained them. Only by accident does 
local news creep in. But in the large discussions of national policy, 
and in news of the foreign events upon which national policy was 
based, they provide a sure guide to both the political theories of 
the new frontier and the party practice. 


CHAPTER XI 
POLITICAL THEORIES OF THE FRONTIER 


THe American frontier was not founded upon any antecedent 
theory of imperial or domestic growth, but emerged with a form 
largely dictated by the status of its land, the life that the early 
settlers could not avoid living upon that land, and the inheritance 
of ideas that the residents possessed. It was a common law pro- 
cess, similar to that which had in England built up the body of 
legal doctrine and political practice. The foreign experience that 
shaped American public growth before 1800 was so completely 
English that frontier society and institutions are plainly the result 
of old habits modified by new environment. 

As frontier thought became weighty enough to be heard across 
the mountains, in the councils of the United States, it was both 
possible and necessary to analyze it and to identify those elements 
that were indigenous, and those that were inherited from either 
the colonial or the European past. The most important of those 
that were native and unavoidable grew out of the fact of isolation 
and distance, which bred self-confidence, equality, and distrust of 
the absentee. 

Isolation is a condition precedent to the development of any 
frontier. Professor Turner has pointed out the differences between 
the various frontiers of the missionary, the hunter, the soldier, the 
stockman, and the farmer. Their common quality lies in the fact 
that a few men were making the first occupation of a vast waste, 
and when the farmer came along behind the roamers who had 
already traversed his region, and perhaps advertised it, he built 
his cabin in a loneliness that was lightened rarely by other human 
presence, Indian or white. For years the cabins remained far from 
each other, separated by wastes of forest. Among themselves, or 
with their former homes, there could be few connections. The 
frontier family could not escape the sense of loneliness and self- 
dependence that lessened the binding force of prior ties, and 
stressed the value of immediate experience. The recollections that 
they had of home were most often those of youth, that had never 
been fully admitted into the confidences of its elders, nor allowed 
to share and learn the responsible burdens of public life. A back- 


96 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ground of general impressions, not checked up with precise in- 
formation, existed everywhere among them. And as the period of 
separation lengthened, the memories blurred. There developed 
both sentimental reminiscence and a full consciousness of separa- 
tion. 

The life of the average frontier settler provides the details that 
make up the picture of the whole; the experience of those that 
were successful built up the mental attitude. There were many 
failures, who never finished a farm, who lived always in squalor, 
and turned shiftless as lack of success became a habit. These made 
a vivid impression on the eye of the outside visitor who described 
the West; but the traits that frontiersmen valued in their leaders 
were those of their luckier or wiser neighbors. Self-confidence was 
the first of these. 

Old age and middle life have always been restive under the ag- 
gressive nerve of youth. Ignorance and self-confidence seem to 
them to be bred together, while their own conservatism appears 
only the natural product of experience. Here along the frontier 
was a whole community of youth, thrown upon its own resources 
to make success or failure. The consequence of success was more 
self-confidence. The failures moved on, moved back, or died. The 
self-made man became the normal leader. Deprived of the re- 
straining voice of age, and led by the intensified initiative of 
youth, the West became a seat of impatient independence. 

The self-confidence of western thought operated against a back- 
ground of equality. It was an equality of fact rather than of 
theory. It has been quite possible, as democratic ideals have 
developed, for a man to accept their principle but dislike their 
practice. Civilization is founded upon the subordination of indi- 
vidual aspiration and accomplishment to the common good, but 
not many men have loved the giving up that this entails. Along 
the frontier, men came to accept the idea of equality with greater 
ease than usual, because as they looked around them, they saw 
men equal. 

In few communities have wealth, station in life, education, or 
refined taste brought less immediate profit to their possessor than 
on the frontier. It was as hard for the rich as for the poor to build 
the cabin, clear the cornfield, extract the first unwilling crop, and 
raise the children through the perils of childhood. There were few 
things that money could buy, in the form of either goods or service; 
and small leisure for the enjoyment of intellectual or social 


POLITICAL THEORIES OF THE FRONTIER ~~ 97 


pleasure. There was grinding labor for all who made life go. The 
occupations at any stage of its development were identical for 
every family on a new frontier. The necessity to live the common 
life made them resentful of the pretensions of persons who tried 
to live it differently. In their minds the distinctions of the older 
States that were based on property or station lost much of their 
significance. Economic and social equality were hard facts that 
they could not evade. 

To this self-confidence, and the insistence that none were better 
than themselves, the frontier life added a distrust of the absentee 
whether in the field of government or business. This absenteeism 
was close to the roots of the Revolution, as it has since been in the 
uneasiness of Ireland, of Egypt, of India, and of the Philippines. 
The American grievance was less that government was bad, than 
that it was remote and beyond control. Aspirations to self-govern- 
ment were intensified by this condition of dependence upon an 
~ absentee. When his claim was not the right to rule but the right 
to a share in the produce of labor, the distrust was as strong, how- 
ever valid might be the law or the contract on which the claim was 
based. The Penns and the Calverts, great proprietors as they 
were, never succeeded in organizing their revenues on a permanent 
basis. It is hard enough to admit the claims of the creditor who 
lives neighbor to the debtor, and understands the situation of the 
latter, even though he does not share it. But when the creditor is 
remote, and has no interest in the debtor except the profits that 
he makes, the door through which misunderstanding may enter is 
wide open. The absentee landlord, or mortgage owner, or share- 
holder, can never expect to have his debtor see eye to eye with him 
along the line of obligation and profit. This absenteeism becomes a 
large factor in explaining the eager frontier demand for autonomy 
in government, and for laws that would help the debtor as against 
his creditor. 

Self-confidence, equality, and the demand for autonomy, were 
unavoidable conditions that the frontier bred. They were ex- 
pressed in a language of words and institutions that were quite as 
unavoidable an inheritance from the colonial past. In each of the 
thirteen colonies there had been similar drift from the ideas of 
England, and the years had built up in each a government that 
men took for granted in the era of independence. 

Always there was a written charter of government. In England 
the lack of a written constitution has perplexed many who have 


98 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


been conscious of the dominance of such documents in America. 
But the American colony was in every case founded upon a 
charter and a body of instructions to royal officials in which the 
powers and limits of government were defined in words. Even the 
most revolutionary of Americans have begun their revolution by 
writing not manifestoes but new constitutions. 

Next to the constitution, there was ever the right and duty of 
some authority to review the acts of government and square them 
with the basic law. In colonial days this had been the function of 
British courts of appeal, and of the king in council. Colonial legis- 
latures had been accustomed to royal disallowance of their laws, 
and colonial courts knew that no doctrine was safe until it had run 
the gauntlet of the English judges. The frontier was not certain 
whether this power to disallow should be exercised by court, or 
governor, or by the people in their sovereign capacity; but it could 
not avoid the existence of the fact. 

In every colony there had existed a governor, not because there 
was a king in England and in imitation of him, but because of the 
great rule of human affairs that some man must direct a work if it 
is to be done. It was a necessary result of independence that the 
selection of this official, whatever name he might bear, should be a 
public duty, and that his title to rule should be derived from the 
voters of his State. 

No colony had even tried to live without an assembly, in which 
some measure of direct representation had a part. Invariably it 
was bicameral, one house owing its existence to the people and 
their votes, the other an outgrowth of the group of councillors that 
every governor gathered around him. ‘The two principles that 
made a difference in basis between the houses were lost when both 
came to be elected, but the balance that two houses gave to gov- 
ernment, and the power to check and revise, kept both of them 
alive. 

The final authority in the colony, as in England, was an electo- 
rate, whose breadth and inclusive character are measures of the 
status of democracy at any time. The continuous struggle in colo- 
nial government was between the absentee principle that the 
governor represented, tending to follow the policy of king and 
parliament, and the self-governing principle that came up through 
the people to their elected representatives, who grasped the com- 
mon purse, and sought to frame the law. It was long before 
Americans could convince themselves that it was possible for an 


POLITICAL THEORIES OF THE FRONTIER — 99 


executive to represent the people, and that governors elected could 
be free from the inclination to represent an alien power. 

With these experiences, that were similar and common to all the 
colonies, the American people entered upon a course of self- 
education in politics when they broke their bond of dependence 
upon England. ‘Twice before 1800, they tried as a whole to frame 
a common government. It was no advantage that an institution 
was English when they selected the parts of their scheme, for they 
had had enough of king and parliament. But it was much that an 
arrangement had worked well in their colonial life, and that they 
understood it. These things, and few others, contributed to the 
Articles of Confederation and the Federal Constitution, and to the 
twenty-five State constitutions made before their first quarter 
century of freedom was over. 

Constitution making in the United States affords a measure of 
popular ideas of government such as no other community pos- 
sesses. It was no accident that upon independence the States 1m- 
mediately proceeded to re-write the basic law. Congress early ad- 
vised such procedure, and before 1780 eleven of the States had 
taken the advice. Rhode Island and Connecticut, whose colonial 
charters were substantially constitutions of free government, 
found it unnecessary to make more than verbal changes to sig- 
nalize the fact of separation. The other States, either in their legis- 
latures or in conventions specially assembled, wrote new docu- 
ments. Their first instinctive feeling was that such constituent 
tasks could be accomplished by the legislature, as in England the 
constitution is whatever parliament amends it to be. But before 
the American revolutionary process was complete, this view had 
given place to the other idea that for a basic law there must be a 
special and solemn assemblage of popular sovereignty, and that 
in a convention this can best take place. 

Before the end of the century four American States had made 
three constitutions each (New Hampshire, Vermont, South Caro- 
lina, and Georgia); three had two each (Pennsylvania, Delaware, 
and Kentucky); seven had a single constitution (Massachusetts, 
New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and 
Tennessee); while two States were yet content with the ancient 
charters (Connecticut and Rhode Island). Every few months since 
1800 one State or another has voluntarily passed through this 
process, and by its acts given evidence of its political faith. The 
men who have been used in the conventions have ranked high, 


100 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


above ordinary considerations of self-interest and party politics, 
so that the evidence has been deliberate and solemn. No im- 
portant movement in politics has been deprived of its chance at a 
hearing, or of a result upon the basic law. In all, as in the first 
twenty-five, can be seen the constant pressure of frontier environ- 
ment lessening unreasonable restrictions, and expanding the share 
of the people in the direct management of their government. 

The typical American State of 1780, as the first crop of constitu- 
tions was completed, retained the governor, the legislature, and 
the courts, much as they existed in colonial times, as well as 
declarations or bills of rights that as yet tended to repeat the 
phrases of the Declaration of Independence. Only five of the 
thirteen States elected the governor directly by popular vote; 
democracy had not yet gone so far. Nine States denied him the 
right of veto. 

The legislature retained the conventional two houses and pos- 
sessed powers that were enlarged in proportion as those of the 
governor were curtailed. In only five of the States was the voter 
freed from property qualifications; while in all the legislator must 
possess property. In most States the legislature took over the 
appointment of judges from the executive, but in eight it was still 
the opinion that judges should hold office during good behavior. 

The three frontier States, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee, 
made six constitutions in the last decade of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. If all the American constitutions were liberal, these were 
ultra. Manhood suffrage, based upon a residence of one year in 
the State, and an age of twenty-one, was adopted in all; except 
that Kentucky, in its second constitution, added the significant 
word white. Their legislators must in every case meet additional 
tests; of superior age, of longer residence, of freehold property, of 
American citizenship, or, as in Vermont, of a belief in God and the 
Scriptures, and membership in a Protestant church. Their gov- 
ernors, too, were protected by requirements of property, age, resi- 
dence, religion, and citizenship. The West had not broken entirely 
from the ideals of the older order, but the advance to manhood 
suffrage was a distinctive sign of progress. 

It is evident as one reads these constitutions that a belief in 
natural rights found ready lodgment in the minds of residents 
along the frontier. Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, and George Mason, in the Virginia Bill of Rights, wrote 
phrases that have been repeated in nearly every constitution that 


POLITICAL THEORIES OF THE FRONTIER — 101 


has since been made. As the crown, and religion, and property 
lost favor as the foundations of government, nature came to be the 
obvious parent of democracy. As jealousy of the crown, or the 
executive, or the courts spread, a belief in balanced powers came 
to pervade these documents. It became more important to pre- 
serve liberty than to get work dene; more desirable to check a 
possible usurpation than to promote efficiency. The Federal Con- 
stitution was ratified while this period of State Constitution mak- 
ing was under way, and it contained no bill of rights. But so great 
were the apprehensions that this lack aroused that a tacit pledge 
was given that the new government should at once amend the 
Constitution to correct this defect. And ten amendments were 
written into it by the States. In the fight over ratification, the 
frontier borders of the thirteen States were suspicious that a game 
was being played against them. Their delegates in the State con- 
ventions voted against ratification, fearing a conspiracy to build 
up a centralized and autocratic power. The normal frontier trend 
against authority and absenteeism, and towards personal liberty, 
remained after the Constitution became effective, and provided 
the materials out of which to build up parties and to struggle for 
national control. Political theory gives us one side of the frontier 
State, but only one. The other must be sought in party practice. 


& 


CHAPTER XII 
JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 


NEITHER the theory nor the practice of politics is alone enough 
basis upon which to construct a picture of a state. The two must 
be taken together, and the outcome is so completely the result of 
their interplay that it is not safe to allow the contemplation of 
either factor to blind the observer to the other. The American 
frontier of 1800 was in political, spiritual, and economic revolt. A 
great religious awakening was either a cause or a consequence of 
the fact that men were deeply stirred. The expression of their 
political opinion swept from power a party that had come to be- 
lieve itself indispensable to the nation. It swept to office Thomas 
Jefferson, as President of the United States; and the form of its 
expression was so nearly that of its leader that it has come to be 
known as Jeffersonian democracy. Once before, in the Revolution, 
such a wave of resentment broke down the British tie. There were 
later waves to come, with Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln 
at their crest. Behind them all lies the mixture of political theory 
and party practice that distinguishes the American frontier areas 
from the rest of the nation. In each case the men broken by one 
wave had been among the leaders of the last, and the clearest voice 
of new guidance came out of the freshest frontier group. 

The growth of American parties began with the inauguration of 
George Washington as President and followed the course sug- 
gested by his experiences and those of his associates in the Revolu- 
tion. His attitude towards the new government entrusted unani- 
mously to his hands was founded on his experience. He, more than 
any other American, knew the costs of the Revolution, and the 
difficulties that had threatened to defeat it. State interest, private 
selfishness, inadequate control, indifference, and poverty, had 
made his task as commander in chief almost impossible. His per- 


1 Robert T. Hill, The Public Domain and Democracy was published in the Columbia 
University Studies, 1910, and endeavors to show something of this process. Andrew C. 
McLaughlin, “Social Compact and Constitutional Construction,” in American Historical 
Review, vol. v, and “‘Democracy and the Constitution,’’ in American Antiquarian Society, 
Proceedings, N.S., vol. xxu, are thoroughly reliable critiques; A. D. Morse, ‘‘Causes and 
Consequences of the Party Revolution of 1800,” in American Historical Association, Re- 
port, 1894, 


JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 103 


manent greatness is based on the character that helped him to 
fight every obstacle without losing sight of the end that his coun- 
trymen ought, at least, to be aiming at. He had learned that there 
could be no sure result under a divided command, nor any result 
without self-sacrifice. Unless a real government could be put to- 
gether among the States there was no ground for hoping that inde- 
pendence might endure. Some of his wisest friends were open 
hopers for a monarchy, and were frankly disappointed when a 
government of enumerated powers under the Constitution was 
all they could attain. The men he trusted most were men who had 
shared with him the difficulties of the past, and who appreciated 
with him the need of a government that could maintain itself 
above either State or private opposition. 

In addition to the special experiences of Washington that gave 
direction to the Federalist Administration of which he became the 
head, there were other influences that ever affect the man in office. 
What we call the “‘administrative point of view” is chiefly the 
understanding of men who are required to get things done; and 
who see the ways and means because they are in office. Whoever 
the leader, of whatever party, with whatever previous avowal of 
political belief, the public office and the open responsibility turn 
him towards the fulfillment of his task. He cannot escape learning 
something of public business when he assumes public responsi- 
bility, and the common complaint that men in office turn indiffer- 
ent to their old ideals means chiefly that men in office have to 
serve the office. 

What his public duty forced upon him as an administrator, 
Washington would gladly have undertaken from conviction and 
experience. Under his direction the dry bones of constitutional 
powers were covered with the flesh of statute and administration. 
His fellow citizens in the older communities did not like any too 
well the emergence of a real, central, national authority; and on 
the border, where any remote government was an affront, it was 
easy to believe that the liberties of the people were in danger. 
What reflections of this sort did not rise spontaneously were read- 
ily suggested by the facile pen of Thomas Jefferson, whom Wash- 
ington had made chief of his cabinet and Secretary of State. 

In every eastern State in 1789, there was clash of social and 
political interests. The organization of the States had not kept 
pace with the spread of population within their own limits. The 
districts from which legislators came had not been re-defined ag 


104 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


sparse counties grew in population. The lack of representation 
among the newer counties created a State situation not unlike that 
of the colonies against England, when they denounced taxation 
without representation. And the desire of the older sections to 
perpetuate the distinctions of property and religion tended to dis- 
franchise their children who emigrated to the West. In States 
where the frontiersmen were German or Scotch-Irish there was 
racial as well as social or economic reason for the conflict. Students 
who accept in full the doctrines of economic determinism have 
suggested that after all the forces that adopted the Constitution, 
and opposed it, were only those of the propertied and the property- 
less. This is an inadequate explanation, and leaves out of account 
the great forces of inheritance and ideals; but it is true that most 
Americans who owned land or slaves or held the securities issued 
by-the revolutionary States, were also believers in a government of 
real powers. Whereas the younger communities, with less experi- 
ence and fewer of the stabilizing bonds of fortune, contained many 
who thought it possible to continue to exist in a freedom approach- 
ing a state of nature. The radical western counties of the east- 
ern States waged a long struggle for equality or domination, 
recording their victories as they won them in successive consti- 
tutions and legislative policies. 

Along the frontier, whether in the older States or throughout 
the new, there were social materials ready to be used in making a 
party to oppose any administration, and specially the Federalists, 
with their belief in firm government. Thomas Jefferson seized the 
leadership in organizing them, and held for four years a strategic 
position at the seat of Federal Government; for Washington had in 
his simplicity thought that all good men might be brought to agree 
in administration, regardless of their attitude towards life, or their 
personal ambitions. The first Washington cabinet was a coalition 
of points of view, if not of factions. To Jefferson nearly every 
measure that Hamilton devised and Washington sponsored, was 
full of danger to the liberty of the people; and what was not inher- 
ently threatening was dubious at least, if Hamilton endorsed it. 
Personality, political ambition, and theory of government made it 
improper that these two men should ever have sat in the same 
government. Jefferson had no sense of loyalty to his chief that 
kept him from using his official position to provide jobs for useful 
party workers and to give form to his urgings that Washington and 
his friends were a menace to the country. 


JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 105 


Not until 1793 did Jefferson leave the cabinet, and he was work- 
ing all the while to nullify its endeavor. His own view of democ- 
racy was derived from philosophical reflection, much of it French 
in origin and similar to those musings on equality that the later 
nobles of the Old Régime in France had indulged in under Louis 
XV. He was himself a Virginia landowner, and near-aristocrat, 
and all his life he loved the comforts and generous existence of the 
southern planter. But his theories of liberty brought him into 
close alignment with the hundreds of thousands of frontiersmen 
to whom equality was an observed condition of life and who were 
somewhat fearful lest others should be allowed to rise above it. 
His political sagacity made of them a party machine on which he 
mounted to leadership. The episodes of policy upon which Wash- 
ington was forced to take a stand were grasped by him, to point 
out that real democracy would have chosen the other side. 

The political issues upon which the Jeffersonian Democracy, or 
- the Democratic-Republicans, were founded, were primarily the 
assumption of the revolutionary debts, foreign, continental, and 
State; the whiskey insurrection of 1791-1794; the policy of neu- 
trality of 1793; and the repressive measures written by the Feder- 
alists into the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798. For each of these 
Jefferson and his friends had an explanation that impugned the 
honest motives of the Federalists and that went so far in the 
extremer forms as to suggest that there was on foot a serious 
attempt to make of Washington a king and to overthrow the ex- 
periment of Federal Government. The first of these issues was 
certainly Hamilton’s; the second probably was; the third was 
Washington’s; and the last represented the idea of the Feder- 
alists in their later phases of carrying through by force what they 
could not gain by favor. 

The assumption of the revolutionary debts was advocated by 
Hamilton as finance minister, in his desire to establish national 
credit on a secure foundation. With them at large and unpaid as 
to principal or interest, new loans were impracticable, and the 
repute of the United States must be uncertain. Their assumption 
played a double réle in his mind. It was at once honest and ex- 
pedient. It would bring into existence a large number of respon- 
sible citizens who, holding the new securities of the country, 
would have a strong interest in its solidity. To the West, that held 
few of the old or new loans and was in chronic debt, the measure 
looked like a stock-jobbing enterprise; for the revolutionary secur- 


106 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ities that were to be funded were depreciated in value, and rose 
sharply to the profit of their holders, as soon as assumption was 
announced as a national policy. Many were in the hands of 
speculators, and some were owned by members of the Congress. 
It was not clear that some public officers had not used their prior 
knowledge of resumption to enrich themselves by speculating in 
the debt. The frontier leaders pointed to this as evidence that the 
new government was the tool of property. 

In the whiskey insurrection the United States showed its new 
ability to collect as well as to lay a tax. The excise law of 1791 
contemplated revenues to be derived from direct taxation, and it 
was in Hamilton’s mind to establish at once whatever powers the 
Federal Government possessed. The law included a tax upon the 
manufacture of whiskey, which has ever been regarded as pecul- 
larly fit for taxation; but in the western regions, and specially the 
new southwestern counties of Pennsylvania (where they had 
recently opposed the Federal Constitution and aided in overturn- 
ing the eastern aristocracy in their own convention) the whiskey 
tax looked like a direct blow for their destruction. 

The frontier farmer, after a year or two, always had enough to 
eat, and had a surplus of food that might mean solvency if it could 
be marketed. But there were few local markets and the bulky raw 
products could not stand a long haul and heavy freight charges. 
Corn was a staple. It could be turned into hogs and driven to 
market furnishing its own transport, and nearly every traveler to 
the West reported the meeting of persistent droves of swine, bound 
eastward. The corn could also be distilled into whiskey and with 
reduced bulk and concentrated value be available for a real export 
trade. Every farmer had his still. The whiskey excise struck him 
not as a manufacturer but as a farmer, whereas the eastern farmer 
bought his whiskey instead of making it, and dodged the inquisi- 
torial tax. When the treasury agents came among the western 
counties, it was only thirty years after the arrival of the British 
stamp agents whose rough treatment in the seaboard colonies had 
been a preliminary of the Revolution. The western farmers dis- 
couraged their neighbors from taking treasury appointments, 
threw rocks at the collectors, shot at their lighted windows after 
dark, and occasionally burned their barns and haystacks. Through 
1792 and 1793 the collection of the whiskey excise was made so 
difficult in western Pennsylvania that the Federal Government 
sensed a general conspiracy to prevent it. Extensive riots around 


JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 107 


Pittsburgh in the spring of 1794 led Washington to vigorous acts 
to keep the Government from being flouted. By proclamation, 
August 7, 1794, he ordered the illegal obstructors to disperse; and 
then he collected from the neighboring eastern States a militia 
body of 13,000 men whom he mobilized at Carlisle, and marched 
to Pittsburgh. Here they overawed the population and there was 
no resistance. The alleged leaders of the rioting were arrested and 
taken east for trial in federal courts. To Andrew Gallatin, a Swiss 
immigrant who had taken up his home on the Youghiogheny, in 
Fayette County, this seemed like a tyrannous usurpation, and 
government by force.? Jefferson disliked it. It was further fuel to 
the fires of partisanship that were already burning fiercely. And 
the radical democrat saw in it proof that the monarchical party 
would found itself on military force. 

The French War of 1793 gave rise to Anti-Federalist sentiments 
that were at the boiling point during the exciting days of the sup- 
_ pression of the whiskey insurrection, and that suspected a corrupt 
alliance with England, as well as monarchy. There was an in- 
stinctive feeling of sympathy for the attempt of France to estab- 
lish a free government in place of the old monarchy, and the phil- 
osophic leaders of the French Revolution were the same men who 
had, a decade earlier, welcomed the American experiment. When 
France declared that now was the time for the alliance of 1778 to 
operate, and Genét arrived to receive the codperation of America, 
democratic feeling ran high everywhere, and on the border was 
hardly mixed with any other reflections. To Washington the 
French War was one of propaganda rather than of defense; and 
a neutral course was the only one that his country could afford. 
Washington could compel Jefferson to administer his policy of 
neutrality, but he could not prevent the Democrats, who were 
already denouncing him, from raising liberty poles, donning the 
red cap of revolution, and drinking copious toasts of sympathy 
to France. Western leaders, like George Rogers Clark, offered 
their services to Genét without reserve, and so affected the mind 
of that young French minister that he ventured to intimate to 
Washington that he could safely appeal from the Government of 
the United States to the people. Genét’s course was short; but 
when Washington rebuked him and hurried John Jay to patch up 


2 Henry Adams, Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), was accompanied by three volumes of 
Writings of Albert Gallatin (1879); for Adams this was a preliminary to his History of the 
United States, 1801-1817 (1889-1890). It provided a permanent monument for Gallatin. 


108 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


a treaty with England, the pro-French and the anti-British and 
the Democrats fought the treaty with bitter earnestness. The 
treaty was ratified by the Senate, but party lines were drawn in 
*he country that Washington had hoped to see develop free from 
faction. 

After 1793 Jefferson was out of the cabinet. He devoted him- 
self to the organization of a chain of Democratic clubs, aimed at 
the winning of elections and the wresting of the country from the 
Federalists. Everywhere the younger local politicians were with 
him, and in Congress a growing number of his followers made a 
nucleus for attacking Federalist policies. The aftermath of the 
Genét episode placed them on the defensive for a time, for the 
three ministers whom President John Adams sent to France, 
Marshall, Gerry, and Pinckney, found the members of the 
Directory to be bribe hunters rather than the priests of liberty 
that the Democrats pictured them to be. When the ministers’ 
dispatches were printed as the X Y Z correspondence, the 
country had a revulsion of Federalist feeling, and the Congress 
chosen during 1796 and 1797 was Federalist in both houses. 

The Federalists, in their return to complete power, had neither 
self-restraint nor wisdom. In the choice of presidential electors in 
1796, after Washington had declined to allow himself to be elected 
for a third term, they picked John Adams as the candidate whom 
they desired their electors to support. The Democrats centered 
on Thomas Jefferson without dispute, but could not elect him. 
The wave of Jeffersonian Democracy was rising, but so long as the 
monolithic character of Washington remained in public life, it 
could not hope to win. Some Democrats talked as though he aimed 
at kingship. Even Jefferson hinted at the danger of monarchy, 
but he was too intelligent an observer to believe the truth of the 
inference he spread. The repute of Washington was fixed. His 
steadiness and courage and his slow honesty were beyond serious 
question. His prestige carried the Federalists into another presi- 
dential term, with Adams in office. But from his residence at 
Mount Vernon, where he died in 1799, he could not give them 
breadth of vision. When the X Y Z dispatches were spread and 
they gained their respite in office, they passed laws to punish their 
political critics and opponents. When they provided for the pos- 
sible deportation of aliens, they had in mind men like Gallatin and 
Philip Freneau, whom Jefferson had patronized; and they enacted 
the naturalization law in the same resentful spirit. In the Sedition 


JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 109 


Law of 1798 they struck at the virulent opposition editors whose 
manners and fluency had kept the Federalists restive for the last 
five years. Political vituperation was a finished art in the eight- 
eenth century, and the Jeffersonian Democrats heaped ridicule 
and insult upon the conservatives, attacking their morals, their 
intelligence, and their patriotism. The laws they passed were 
obviously in contravention of the Constitution or its amendments, 
which had aimed at securing freedom of speech and of the press; 
but the rage of Federalists was blinding upon them. In the sum- 
mer of 1798 Jefferson was again at his desk pointing out to his 
friends how unconstitutional the repressive laws were and raising 
the question whether such laws could not be nullified by the re- 
fusal of the States to let them be enforced. 

Most leaders of thought in the United States would perhaps 
have agreed with Jefferson that the Federal Government was yet 
_ an experiment and that a break-up was within the realm of pos- 
sibility. He was not anxious to break the Union down when he 
suggested State action similar to nullification to his friends; he 
was only a politician taking advantage of the indiscretion of an 
Administration. But he was playing with high explosives in sug- 
gesting a remedy for unconstitutional law outside the courts or 
Congress. In the autumn of 1798 his aids, keeping his prompting 
secret, brought up in Virginia and Kentucky two sets of memorable 
resolutions dealing with the relative powers of State and Federal 
Governments. These were supported as party manifestoes by men 
who had no thought of more than party action; and in finished 
form they were transmitted to the several States inviting their 
codperation in ridding the United States of the obnoxious laws. 
Rebuffed by such States as chose to discuss the matter at all, 
Kentucky returned in 1799 to the argument and expressed a belief 
in nullification by the States as a possible remedy against usurpa- 
tion. That men could still say this in 1799 gives special emphasis 
to the importance of the two Administrations of George Washing- 
ton in carrying the Constitution from an atmosphere of frank 
experiment to one of stable expectation and in erecting a Govern- 
ment whose law could be “‘the supreme law of the land.” For 
Jefferson, the Federalist mistakes and the Virginia and Kentucky 
manifestoes were the last steps in the organization of a victorious 


party. 


3 E.D. Warfield, Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (1887); Frank M. Anderson, “Contemporary 
Opinion on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions,’’ in American Historical Review, vol. v. 


110 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


In 1800 Thomas Jefferson received seventy-three electoral votes 
for President, against sixty-five for John Adams, and was inducted 
into the office after the House of Representatives had disposed of 
a dispute within the Democratic party over which Democrat, 
himself or Burr, was really chosen. The claim of Aaron Burr, de- 
cided against him, and giving evidence of a tough and unrespon- 
sive political conscience, became within a few years the motive 
force for an episode that reveals the West as it was in 1806. For 
the present it was enough that in 1800 the new party of the West, 
inspired by its equalitarian environment and skillfully led by a 
statesman of political genius, had gained enough momentum to 
break down in their old age the party of the men who had been 
leaders in the American Revolution. The perennial suspicion of 
youth for age was reinforced by liberal ideas against conservatism, 
and by the uniformity of a frontier section against the more diver- 
sified older part. 


CHAPTER XIII 
THE FRONTIER OF 1800 


THIRTY-SEVEN years after the British Government placed a limit 
to western expansion at the watershed of the Appalachians, the 
people of the colonies had grown in number from perhaps 1,600,000 
to 5,300,000, and in the region then closed to their entry nearly a 
million settlers had taken up their homes and built a new civiliza- 
tion. In 1800 this border area produced the party of Jefferson that 
took possession of the Federal Government. Even Americans were 
not prepared in their minds for the sudden shift of political power. 
The English bewilderment and dismay at the loss of the American 
colonies was fully paralleled by eastern discouragement at the 
victory of the Republicans. All along the seaboard, persons of 
- position were irritated at the control by a new democracy. The 
resentment was keenest east of the Hudson, and here the unwilling- 
ness to endure it was most nearly uniform. There were Demo- 
cratic-Republicans everywhere, for everywhere there were young 
voters, men without property, and farmers struggling under the 
burden of their debt. But the sectional distribution of interests 
and the uniformity of the West behind the leadership of Jefferson 
are so manifest that the year 1800 becomes the dividing point 
between two chapters of political history. The background of 
popular movements for the next two decades is to be found along 
the frontier revealed by the census of 1800. Not only its political 
theory and party practice, but its numerical strength, social and 
religious habits, and changing relation to the eternal problem of 
its land, are needed to show it as it was.! 

In the ten years after the first census of 1790, the population 
of the United States increased about thirty-five per cent, from 
8,900,000 to 5,300,000.2 The increase would have been great 


1 Henry Adams, History of the United States, vol. 1, opens with a brilliant and permanent 
picture of American society in 1801. His interpretations, as might be expected of a great- 
grandson of John Adams, do not always give Thomas Jefferson the benefit of the doubt. 
Historians are still struggling against the northern tide-water point of view which Richard 
Hildreth established in The History of the United States of America (1849-1856), in counter- 
blast to the writings of George Bancroft. Adams was of the Hildreth tradition, and Chan- 
ning in our day keeps it alive, all with great learning and complete sincerity. 

2, W. S. Rossiter, A Century of Population Growth from the First Census of the United 
States io the Twelfth, 1790-1900 (1909), is a useful publication of the Bureau of the Census, 
with many maps and diagrams, but without the invaluable shaded population maps. 


EASTERN 


(e) 
DIVISIONS 
(e) 


Petes 
VIRXSGINIA 
° 


MISSISsippy 
ERRITORY 
1798 


THE FRONTIER LINE OF 1800 


0000000 Six Inhabitants per Square Mile 





THE FRONTIER OF 1800 113 


enough to disarrange relationships under any condition; it was the 
more notable because it came almost exclusively from excess of 
births over deaths. There was so little immigration that it may be 
ignored. The Americans of 1800 were American born of American 
parents, and had ceased to be conscious of even cultural associa-- 
tion with outside sources, while the idea of a hyphenated nation- 
ality was not yet conceived. The non-English strains, except the 
Scotch-Irish, were disappearing as the prevalence of migratory 
habits, and the English language widened; or else were restricted 
and walled-off by the foreign language that they spoke. The 
German groups in Pennsylvania, and in parts of the mountain 
valleys, preferred to live a life apart. As individual members of 
their race acquired influence they appeared in history as Ameri- 
cans, with little beyond the German family name to distinguish 
them from their fellow citizens. 

The frontier line of over six inhabitants to the square mile, in 
— 1800, runs winding but unbroken from Lake Champlain to the 
Atlantic Ocean, a little south of the mouth of the Savannah River. 
Three marked protuberances westward from the general line of 
the watershed are in middle New York, where the Mohawk region 
was flourishing, in the upper Ohio Valley where a great colony 
covered the borders of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Northwest 
Territory, and in the upland country of Georgia, where travelers 
along the Falls Line trails crossed the Savannah at Augusta and 
were pushing into the future cotton country. West of the solid 
line were three great detached island tracts, indicated respectively 
by the Blue Grass of Kentucky, the valleys of East Tennessee, and 
the Cumberland district of Middle Tennessee. The other isolated 
settlements of even trifling density were small and unimportant, 
but in scattered clearings there were beginnings of civilized life 
over all the vast wedge of land that projects itself west from the 
mountains, between southern Indiana and northern Alabama, to 
. the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi. A rural economy pre- 
vailed over all the West even more markedly than elsewhere in the 
Union. Lexington boasted 1797 inhabitants, and Frankfort 628; 
Nashville reported 355, and Cincinnati 500; while Pittsburgh with 
but 1565 had not yet realized its future place at the head of the 
Ohio commercial area. 

The social life of the frontier was as generally shaped by the 
factor of separation as was the political, and the more so on this 
transmontane border which the mountains cut off from their 


114 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


social base. The rough and winding paths through the mountain 
gaps forced the average migrant to abandon hope of quick return. 
The separation that induced self-reliance in government forced 
the pioneer to make his own furniture, build his own houses out of 
local materials, and get along with what his environment could 
supply him. The trails leading to the East were worse rather than 
better in 1800, for they had been heavily traveled without im- 
provement. Where there were deep streams, private speculators 
conducted private ferries at extortionate rates. Elsewhere the 
rows of more or less parallel ruts that passed for roads forbade any 
traveler but the rider on horseback to make much progress. 
Wheeled vehicles for pleasure were hardly known, and the heavy 
farm wagons were moved only with disproportionate waste of 
strength. The leveling influence of frontier economy kept the 
well-to-do and the poor alike well fed but rough, in a world of 
simplicity. 

Here and there, in the older parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, 
there was a house of stone or brick. Residences of sawed lumber 
were so rare as to attract attention. At Steubenville in 1807 a 
traveler counted one hundred and sixty houses — including a 
“gaol of hewn stone,” a courthouse of squared logs, and a brick 
Presbyterian church. The typical home was the cabin built of logs, 
and limited by the shape of the material to small rooms, low ceil- 
ings, and single stories. In the cabin attic, reached by a ladder of 
saplings and restricted by the slope of a leaky roof, were pallets, 
and rough beds of log frame with rope or rawhide bottoms. The 
location of the home was generally determined by some natural 
spring, and the water that was carried for domestic use was heated 
in a swinging pot over an open fire, in a great fireplace. There 
were few artisans in the migration to the West, and the furniture 
proved it. What the axe, maul, and wedge could not produce was 
lacking from the ordinary home. Nails were too rare for common 
use, and wooden pegs did service for them. Mortar and plaster . 
were beyond the domestic architect, but mud could and did stop 
the chinks between the logs. 

By 1800 the external aspect of the landscape was changing, with 
the extension of cleared fields, and the gradual rebuilding of cabins 
over the older areas. But inside the cabins the family life still em- 
braced the whole range of domestic manufactures. The frontier 
graveyards show how hard the early life was on the women of the 
family. The patriarch laid to rest in his family tract, beside two, 


THE FRONTIER OF 1800 115 


three, or four wives who had preceded him, is much more common 
than the hardy woman who outlived her husbands. The housewife 
came to her new home young and raw, and found for neighbors 
other girls as inexperienced. She bore the children; and buried a 
staggering number of them, for medicine and sanitation, inade- 
quate everywhere, were out of reach for the cabin on the border. 
She fed her men and raised her children, cooked their food and 
laid it by for winter. She was at once butcher, packer, and baker. 
The family clothes showed her craftsmanship, with skins playing a 
large part, and homespun or knitting revealing a luxury estab- 
lished. When one adds to the grinding and unavoidable labor, the 
anguish that came from sickness and danger, the frontier woman 
who survived becomes an heroic character, and the children who 
felt her touch become the proper material from which to choose 
the heroes of a nation. 

- The loneliness of frontier life made a craving for companionship 
that gives peculiar character to its religion, politics, and play. 
Nearly every traveler, whose journey took him to the region, 
noticed this trait and described the group activities that lightened 
it. ‘The frontier social life may be said to have its beginning at the 
log-raising that attended the construction of the cabin. The single 
axman could cut his trees, and notch them, but he lacked ap- 
pliances or strength to lay the logs in place. When the timbers 
were ready the neighbors of the countryside would ride in on 
horseback, from thirty or forty miles away. With wives on pillion 
and infants in arms they came; for where one went it was easiest 
for all to go. They made a picnic of the occasion, and the able- 
bodied men in a few hours, too few to spoil the play, piled up the 
logs and laid the roof. The frontier welcomed the legitimate excuse 
for such a gathering. Weddings became boisterous and rude, with 
home-stilled whiskey in an open tub, a drinking gourd at its side. 
Funerals lost something of their solemnity when relatives and 
friends so manifestly welcomed the opportunity to get together. 
The occasions came infrequently, but when they came there were 
stores of pent-up loneliness to be relieved. In politics and in re- 
ligion, there was a formative condition in this fact that every 
gathering was a neighborhood festivity and that teaching and 
argument must be phrased in the language of excitement to meet 
_ the need of loneliness. 

The habit of church-going, that was established in the middle 
and northern colonies, found little chance to indulge itself upon 


116 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the border. There was neither church nor parson; nor funds to 
maintain them until after some years of successful farming. The 
occasional preacher found a flock awaiting him, regardless of creed; 
and willing to listen if he could speak its language. The generality 
of the congregation, got together for sporadic meetings, made 
narrow doctrinal sermons less available than humanitarian ex- 
hortations fitted to the Ten Commandments. 

Since the dominant racial strains that filled the valleys west of 
the Susquehanna and that poured thence into Kentucky and 
Tennessee were Scotch-Irish, it was natural that the Presbyterian 
church had more adherents than any other on the border in the 
eighteenth century. This faith made a strong entry into America 
early in the century. As early as 1717 there was a synod at Phila- 
delphia, and thereafter the church had a continuous organic ex- 
istence. In 1802, David Rice and thirty-seven ministers founded 
a synod in Kentucky and claimed as their domain all the country 
west of the mountains. There can be little doubt that this Pres- 
byterian predisposition had much to do with the border aptitude 
for self-government and federation. Within the Presbyterian 
churches self-government took root early and became ineradicable. 
The federal position of the synod made the members of the church 
ready to look on central government as the creature of the people 
rather than their master. A large proportion of the leaders of the 
Jeffersonian Democracy were pious members of Presbyterian 
congregations. 

Behind the Presbyterians, but in the making, were the Meth- 
odist and Baptist churches. The last were well suited to frontier 
habits, but were less important in 1800 than those of the Meth- 
odist Episcopal faith, whose bishop, Francis Asbury, had led them 
without rival since his ordination in 1784. The evangelical zeal of 
the Methodists fitted them well for work upon the frontier, but 
they had first to overcome the long start that Presbyterians had 
acquired. Every year, however, helped them. The older Presby- 
terian congregations were firm in their desire for a learned clergy 
and possessed a religion with a tough intellectual content. In the 
United States there were few colleges that could fit men for the 
Presbyterian pulpit, and of the ministers who immigrated from 
England and Scotland, not many were allowed to go as far west as 
the border. The college at Princeton owed its foundation to the 
desire for more trained men of this faith. But when the church 
procured the men, it found that the frontier type of mind, craving 


THE FRONTIER OF 1800 117 


companionship and warmth rather than close-reasoned theology, 
did not furnish the best field for their activity. 

The Methodists and Baptists laid less stress on a learned clergy, 
and more on the power of exhortation. The rough and ready cir- 
cuit rider was a natural democrat, with a message for every sinner.® 
Occasionally as he preached the burden of sin and the need for 
salvation, some preacher set the frontier ablaze with the fire of 
religious enthusiasm and started revivals that spread far from the 
scene of immediate origin. Among the meetings in the Kentucky 
settlements, as early as 1798, preaching is reported to have had 
unusual effects. Public conversion and confession of experiences 
became common. The meetings were marked by excesses of emo- 
tion, by jumpings and barkings of the conscious sinners, who often 
fell upon the floors exhausted in stupor, after their exaltation. 
The forms that mass religion may take in an untaught community, 

hungry for contacts, may be observed here. In August, 1801, at a 
camp meeting held at Cain Ridge in Kentucky, there were six con- 
tinuous days of sustained Satan enthusiasm, and contemporary 
accounts relate that as many as twenty thousand persons were in 
attendance. The revival of 1801 spread from this beginning until 
in a few months the whole border was stirred up over the deadly 
consequence of sin quite as completely as it had just been over the 
evil tendencies of the Federalist party. The religious revival and 
democratic partisanship seem to be different aspects of the same 
capacity of the frontier. They operated at the expense of intel- 
lectual religion and constructive statesmanship; but for nearly 
_ fifty years the religion, politics, and trade of the Mississippi Valley 
continue to show their impress. 

Under these influences, and with educational opportunity 
limited, the Presbyterian church lost in relative standing after 
1800. Not only the Methodist and Baptist congregations grew in 
number and strength, but within the Presbyterians there were 
democratic stirrings, to make the church more responsive to the 
frontier. Unable to change the whole, these movements became 
schismatic. —The Cumberland Presbyterians were off on an inde- 
pendent course by 1810; the Christian Church followed a little 
later. The frontier continued for several decades to provide fol- 


3 Lorenzo Dow was among the most noted of these, History of Cosmopolite: or, the Writ- 
ings of Rev. Lorenzo Dow: Containing his Experience and Travels, in Europe and America, 
up to near his fiftieth Year. Also his Polemic Writings, to which is added the ‘ Journey of Lafe,’ 
by Peggy Dow. Revised and corrected with Notes (5th ed., 1857). Catharine C. Cleveland, 
The Great Revival in the West, 1797-1805 (1916), ranks high among our histories of religion. 


118 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


lowers for any teacher who proclaimed a new Gospel or interpreted 
an old one in a language comprehensible to its spirit. The old ties 
were broken, the eternal needs of the human soul continued to pre- 
vail, but the common experiences of religion needed to be restated 
in terms of frontier life. 

The year 1800 witnessed many changes in American relation- 
ships, in the course of which the newer communities gained points 
of vantage for influencing the nation. Their spiritual upheaval 
brought religious organization into closer harmony with their 
habits of life; their political power brought their chosen leader 
into the chief office of the United States; their demands in a Con- 
gress that was listening with interest to their call procured a re- 
vision of the basic law that governed their access to the land. 

Whatever social, religious, or political aspect they assumed, the 
early stages of their growth were dominated by the underlying 
structure of institutions arising from the land and its acquisition. 

The ordinances passed in 1785 and 1787 sketched the outlines 
of the land system and the colonial system, so far as the States of 
the public domain are concerned. Before the century ended their 
administration had progressed far enough to reveal the character 
of the structure of which they were a part. In a colonial way, the 
Northwest Territory was running a bumpy course, amid Indian 
controversy and party faction. The Territory south of the Ohio 
lasted only until 1796, when it became the State of Tennessee. 
Then it passed into abeyance, for the detached strip which the 
United States claimed, south of the Georgia lands, was in actual 
possession of the Spanish outposts. Not until 1798 did these au- 
thorities, reluctantly and after every excuse for delay had been 
tried, surrender to the United States the country between the 
thirty-first parallel and the Yazoo line. The Territory of Mississippi 
was created in the same year to take over all American soil south- 
west of Georgia, and to receive a few years later the lands beyond 
the Chattahoochee when Georgia was at last ready to give them up. 

Only a beginning of the administration of the land system by 
Congress had taken place before 1800. The rule of survey was 
permanently established, and every year men were in the field 
marking the corners of townships, and running the range and base 
lines. But the weight of the emigration went to lands in private 
hands. Kentucky and Tennessee and the Ohio end of Virginia, 


4 Catharine Van Cortlandt Mathews, Andrew Ellicott, his Life and Letters (1908), deals 
with the career of one of the most successful surveyors. 


THE FRONTIER OF 1800 119 


that has become the State of West Virginia, and the western end 
of Pennsylvania, contained so much available farm land that the 
exploitation of the Northwest languished. Even here the private 
lands were on the market earliest, outside the limited area of the 
Seven Ranges, that came on the market shortly after 1785. The 
Ohio Associates had land for sale, and Symmes in the hinterland 
of Cincinnati, and the Connecticut Land Company in its Western 
Reserve, and in the Scioto Valley every settler had Virginia scrip 
to sell. There was little pressure upon Congress to increase the 
area of its surveys as yet, and few buyers offered themselves after 
the first purchases. 

Under the system of private sale of large tracts by Congress, 
there were only three transactions before the laws received their 
first revision in 1796. The Ohio Associates, Symmes, and the 
State of Pennsylvania were the three original purchasers of whole- 
sale tracts. The first of these procured a right to buy five million 
acres, but was able to finance the purchase of only 822,900 acres. 
It is a matter of satisfaction that the Scioto Associates, whose 
greed held up for a time the legitimate proposal of Putnam and his 
colleagues, were a failure from the start and never bought an acre 
of the 4,900,000 included under their option. When they finally 
bought land to take care of the deluded French immigrants, they 
bought not under their option from Congress, but of the Ohio 
Associates. The contract of John Cleves Symmes, concluded at 
the same time, was only partially fulfilled. According to Donald- 
son, whose Public Domain is the standard quarry from which to 
extract figures relating to the lands, Symmes finally closed his deal 
after taking 248,540 acres. The State of Pennsylvania took nearly 
as much, 202,187 acres, when it bought a remnant of New York 
lands in order to procure a frontage for itself on Lake Erie. 

The Pennsylvania “‘triangle”’ as it appears on the modern map 
was the result of the land cessions and compromises. When New 
York and Massachusetts resolved their dispute, they both aban- 
doned to Congress the territory south of Lake Erie and west of the 
meridian drawn from the tip of Lake Ontario. As the surveys re- 
vealed it, for the fact was hardly suspected when the grant was 
made, this line cut the Pennsylvania boundary about forty miles 
east of the northwest corner of that State. The purchase was con- 
cluded in 1792, under an act authorizing it, passed four years 
before. 

In the summer of 1790, at the request of the House of Repre- 


120 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


sentatives, Hamilton made a report upon the status of the public 
lands and their disposition. He discussed the two views of the 
domain that were already visible; the desire to sell in large tracts 
as a means of raising revenue, and the need of the local inhabitant, 
or future immigrant, to be able to buy what he could cultivate. 
Hamilton proposed that both purposes should be served, that a 
General Land Office be erected at the seat of Government, with 
local offices in the vicinity of the lands themselves, and that pur- 
chases be allowed ranging from one hundred acres to an individual 
farmer, to a township of one hundred square miles to the whole- 
sale buyer. The inactivity of the system under the law of 1785 is 
revealed by the fact that Hamilton makes no mention of the six- 
mile township then established. It was over twenty years before 
Congress created the General Land Office he advised, and it paid 
no attention to his recommendation that the size of the unit be 
changed. In 1796 it passed a general law for the survey and sale 
of Ohio lands, adhering to the rule that Indian cession and survey 
must precede occupation, but admitting the plan of local adminis- 
tration of the sales. The smallest unit that could be bought was 
one section of six hundred and forty acres. Under this law 121,540 
acres were sold by 1800, making at that time the total sale of lands 
for the benefit of the United States, 1,484,047 acres. 

The considerable occupation of parts of the public domain be- 
gins after the Treaty of Greenville, and the quieting of the Indian 
threat against the households of the Northwest Territory. Thus 
far in the history of the public domain no one had made a source 
of revenue out of it. The fair hopes that Congress expressed in 
1780 had failed so far as using the trust fund to reduce the Revo- 
lutionary debt was concerned. The large buyer had not been suc- 
cessful; the small buyer had no chance, for the unit of six hundred 
and forty acres was beyond his means. The terms of sale, laid 
down in 1796, allowed a credit of one year on half the purchase 
price of two dollars an acre. It was a rare local resident who had 
six hundred and forty dollars ready when he took up his land and 
could procure another six hundred and forty dollars to complete 
the transaction within a year. He was fortunate if after a year 
he had food for his family and stock and had escaped the perils of 
disease and accident. 

There was no voice in Congress from the public land area to 
express the defects of the law of 1796 until after 1799. The south- 
ern territory had lapsed; the Northwest was in the first territorial 


THE FRONTIER OF 1800 121 


stage with a governor and judges, but no self-government. In 
1799 St. Clair found his population so large that an elected as- 
sembly was necessary. One of the first acts of this body was to 
select the delegate to Congress that the Constitution allows, and 
William Henry Harrison was the choice. 

William Henry Harrison is a fair specimen of the Virginia strain 
that made that State the mother of western commonwealths. He 
was born in 1773, on a tide-water plantation on the lower James 
River in Virginia; and was son of a father who sat in the first Con- 
tinental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence. 
At the age of nineteen he was in the army of the United States, and 
at twenty-one he served under Wayne at Fallen Timbers. In 1798 
he received a minor post in the employ of the Northwest Territory, 
and the following year the first territorial assembly elected him to 
Congress. He knew both the country opened by Wayne’s victory 
_and the point of view of the Virginia and Kentucky frontiersmen. 
In Congress he became the first spokesman from the public do- 
main. He demanded a law for the farmer and secured its passage. 

The land law espoused by Harrison was signed May 10, 1800, 
and, says McMaster, “‘did far more for the good of his country 
than his great victory over the Prophet at Tippecanoe, or his de- 
feat of Tecumseh at the battle of the Thames.” For the next forty 
years the personality of Harrison was an embodiment of the west- 
ern spirit. For twenty of them every farmer who took up a resi- 
dence on the public lands came beneath his influence. It was 
provided in the new law that the lands should be sold locally, in 
tracts of half-sections, or three hundred and twenty acres. At 
Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Marietta, and Steubenville, land offices 
were to be opened with registers in charge. For the term of three 
weeks the tracts were to be offered at auction to the highest bid- 
der; after this time they were to be sold at private sale at two 
dollars an acre, on a credit extending to four years or more. The 
terms of the law required that the purchaser should pay the survey 
fee (six dollars per section) and deposit ten cents an acre when he 
filed his claim. The balance of the purchase price was spread in 
installments over four years; one quarter within forty days, a 
second fourth within two years, and the balance at the end of the 
third and fourth years after the contract. There were discounts 
for cash, and interest on the unpaid balances, but the substantial 
fact remains that under the Harrison Law, the United States be- 
came the partner of every settler who wished to try his luck upon 


122 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the public domain, required him to put up only fifty cents an acre 
in advance and took its chance with him as to the success or failure 
of the enterprise. In four years, if successful, the settler expected 
to earn his farm out of its produce. Whether it was a good system 
for the country, or a vicious inducement to speculation and eva- 
sion of obligations, remained to be seen as the law directed the 
flow of settlers into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Mississippi, 
Louisiana, and Missouri. It opens a fresh chapter in settlement, 
coincident with the other new chapters of 1800. 


CHAPTER XIV 
OHIO: THE CLASH OF PRINCIPLES 


WHILE the legislature of Kentucky, under the master hand of 
Jefferson, was avowing that the United States “are not united on 
the principle of unlimited submission to their general govern- 
ment,” and was bringing to a focus the personal antipathies and 
sectional points of view that had arisen under the Federalist 
régime, the great and undenied principle that it asserted was re- 
ceiving a concrete embodiment north of the Ohio, in the North- 
west Territory. Here, for ten years, General Arthur St. Clair had 
governed as viceroy of Congress. That he was called governor 
instead of viceroy failed to hide the fact of autocratic control. In 
the scheme of things embraced in the Ordinance of 1787 there was 
no place for popular influence in territorial government during the 
first phase of the latter; and St. Clair belonged to the age and 
school that tended to distrust the popular influence in any form. 
By law and by temperament he represented the distasteful idea of 
“unlimited submission”’; but his reign came to an end when the 
growth of numbers among his subjects entitled them in 1798 to 
elect members for a general assembly. In the meetings of this 
body in 1799 there was revealed the distance that the frontier had 
traveled since the Revolution. In Kentucky the constitution of 
1792 was already outworn and replaced by a more generous basic 
law in this same year. 

Even if there had not been a growth of national parties, there 
would still have developed many grounds for controversy in the 
Northwest Territory under St. Clair. The various little groups 
that planted themselves along the Ohio wanted to push into the 
interior faster than the Indians receded. The outlying districts 
were ever in danger of destruction and massacre, and the govern- 
ment never had at its disposal a force capable of policing the 
border. The wars of the early nineties were only aggravations of 
the situation until Wayne secured a victory. And it was but 
natural that the people should hold St. Clair responsible for the 
inconveniences they suffered.! 


1 Emilius O. Randall and Daniel J. Ryan, History of Ohio (1912), enlarges upon and ree 
places Rufus King, Ohio: First Fruits of the Ordinance of 1787 (1888). 


124 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


There was the constant factor of life under control, a situation 
annoying to Americans wherever they have found it. For over a 
decade they were thus suppressed, and in every section of the 
territory there was discontent. The criticism gained leadership 
and focus from the settlements in the Scioto Valley, where there 
were the special unities that came from a common Kentucky- 
Virginia origin and the Virginia land warrants with which they 
bought their land. Chillicothe was the very center of this, and a 
forceful personality showed itself in one Dr. Edward Tiffin, their 
leader. As Jeffersonian democracy gained within the States, the 
Jeffersonians here became ambitious for a new State dominated 
by his doctrines, and waited impatiently the time when it could be 
cut away from the Northwest. The first meeting of the legislature 
in 1799 started the movement that hereafter gained in speed and 
weight until it was successful. 

The procedure of getting self-government under way was de- 
fined by the Ordinance. In December, 1798, representatives were 
chosen for the legislature, at the rate of one for each five hundred 
free male inhabitants in the population. These convened on call 
of St. Clair at Cincinnati, in February, 1799, to complete the work 
by nominating the members of council. They elected ten “‘resi- 
dents of the district,” each possessed of a “‘freehold in five hundred 
acres of land”’; and from this list, the President of the United 
States caused the selection of five, to constitute the council of the 
territory. In September, 1799, the whole legislature met at Cin- 
cinnati, already indignant at the fact that St. Clair had of his own 
will determined their place of meeting. That he had presumed to 
provide a seal for the territory without consulting the will of the 
people added fuel to the flames. The session was one of denuncia- 
tion and dispute. When it was over, St. Clair made the breach 
between himself and the Jeffersonians complete by vetoing every 
important statute that the territorial legislature had enacted. 

With the beginning of self-government, came also the first step 
in federal relations. The territory was entitled to a delegate to sit 
in Washington. St. Clair desired the post for himself, but was 
beaten by Harrison, who proceeded to Philadelphia to sit in the 
last session held by Congress in that capital. Before the session 
ended and Congress packed up to move the seat of Government 
to Washington in the summer of 1800, two significant laws had 
been enacted upon Harrison’s leadership. One, on May 10, laid 
the foundation for twenty years of land administration; the other, 


OHIO: THE CLASH OF PRINCIPLES 125 


on May 7, divided the Northwest Territory and created the Ter- 
ritory of Indiana from its western half. Early in 1801, Harrison 
was back in Indiana, as its first governor, while his former fellow 
citizens were at work at statehood. 

The division of the Northwest Territory was a concrete issue 
upon which the factions could express their views. Underneath 
the discussion lay the motive of Federalists, who feared that the 
new State would be Jeffersonian, and therefore urged such a divi- 
sion as would long defer its admission. St. Clair advocated the 
Scioto River as the western boundary of the projected State, and 
his friends advanced arguments against unwieldly extent for any 
State. The solemn agreement in the Ordinance of 1787 that the 
line of division should be the mouth of the Great Miami, weighed 
little with the men who saw in statehood a means of advancing or 
retarding party power. It had as little weight with Jeffersonians, 
who wished as soon as possible to get the requisite sixty thousand 
population in order to qualify for admission. They wanted gener- 
ous boundaries, to get it the more quickly. The line of the Great 
Miami was a little too far east for them, because the drift of settle- 
ment had carried the population somewhat below Cincinnati, on 
the Ohio. The Miami region lay in a semi circle, with Cincinnati 
as its center; if the boundary started at the Miami mouth, it 
would not only cut off the people living further west, but would 
deprive the new State of needed numbers. They had the votes to 
prevent any reduction of the State. The eastern boundary of 
Indiana, as sketched in the division act of May 7, 1800, was a line 
starting on the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Kentucky River 
(and leaving the whole Miami settlement to its east). The bound- 
ary ran thence somewhat east of north to the post that Wayne had 
built in 1793, and named Fort Recovery; thence it ran north to 
the Canadian line. 

The Eastern Division of the Northwest Territory was started 
towards statehood by this partition. It was not yet called Ohio, 
and it still embraced the settlements around Detroit, later te be- 
come Michigan. But St. Clair’s dominance was over, even though 
he was allowed to linger in his post as governor for more than a 
year after Jefferson became President of the United States. Con- 
gress was listening to the radical population, and this element 
was drawing the lines of successful partisanship. To the special 
humiliation of St. Clair, the seat of government for the Eastern 
Division was shifted from Cincinnati, where his friends were most 


126 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


numerous, to Chillicothe, where he was a lonely and discarded 
figure. 

In the two years after the division, the drift of settlement re- 
moved the necessity to worry over aggregate population. All the 
river towns became ports of arrival and centers of distribution for 
the interior. Nearly every town dreamed dreams of future great- 
ness as a western metropolis, on the common border of East and 
West, with the surrounding country lying in economic dependence 
upon it. Wheeling, next to Pittsburgh, became the gateway, 
though neither of these towns lay in the Northwest Territory. 
From Wheeling, Ebenezer Zane had marked his southwest trace 
after 1796; and along Zane’s Trace arose the first group of interior 
landlocked settlements. The land already on sale under the old 
grants of Congress became inadequate, and entries poured in upon 
the new land offices, opened under Harrison’s law of 1800. It was 
an incentive that Congress under this law became a three-fourths 
partner in every venture. When in 1802 Congress took the next 
step, and authorized the Eastern Division to become a State, it 
was safe and convenient to draw in the western boundary, from 
the temporary line of the Kentucky River to the one originally 
designated in 1787: the meridian of the mouth of the Great Miami. 

In no new State ahead of Ohio had it been possible for Congress 
to imagine that it was the real parent, with a controlling hand 
upon the acts of the people. Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee 
had made constitutions at their own convenience, and Congress 
had only had to name the day at which the fact of participation in 
the Union should begin. But in Ohio it was different, with the 
parentage of Congress completely established, and with a national 
administration desirous of shaping the result. On April 30, 1802, 
the people of the Eastern Division were authorized, or “enabled” 
by law to hold a convention, frame a constitution, and become a 
State. For more than a century thereafter Congress made a 
general practice of passing enabling acts when in its judgment a 
territory was ripe for statehood, and these laws became conven- 
ient places for the expression of opinion as to the character of 
government that the new State should assume. Once in the Union, 
the State was a free agent as to its internal organization, so long as 
it refrained from violating the Federal Constitution or laws of 
Congress, and maintained a republican form of government. But 
it could not get into the Union without the consent of Congress 
and the power to withhold this consent gave leverage to Congress 


OHIO: THE CLASH OF PRINCIPLES 127 


in its demands upon the new States. A few of the later States made 
constitutions without enabling acts, but Congress always held 
such conduct against them. 

Under the Enabling Act, the convention sat at Chillicothe in 
the month of November, 1802. Its meeting rang the knell of St. 
Clair’s power. The convention was in the hands of his party 
enemies and proceeded to its work without any recognition of his 
existence. He resented this, demanded a hearing before the body, 
and indulged himself in a partisan attack upon the Enabling Act 
and the President of the United States. Upon receipt of a copy of 
the speech, Jefferson dismissed him from office, not as a Federalist 
but as a disloyal subordinate, and St. Clair lost the satisfaction of 
carrying to fulfillment the colonial venture over which he had 
presided from the start. The Virginia democracy finished what 
New England soldiers began. 

The constitution of Ohio reflected in its articles not only the 
- common experience of the men of the frontier, but the special 
hatred of autocratic power that had been created in the North- 
west during the territorial period. Its outstanding spirit is that of 
distrust of executive government. There was as yet no recognition 
of the view that Andrew Jackson was later to acclimate in the 
West, that the executive could be strengthened if only he could 
be depended upon. Perhaps the greatest single difference between 
the democracy of Jefferson and that of Jackson was to turn on 
this; Jefferson revolted at government itself, while Jackson re- 
volted at government by those whom he believed to be unfaithful 
and aristocratic. In 1802 the dislike of St. Clair was still too 
powerful for democrats to admit that any governor could be 
trusted. Accordingly the convention sheared away his power. 
The Ohio governor was given no veto, and no appointing power. 
He was merely an executive subordinate to the legislature, with a 
salary that the constitution limited, for the present, to a maximum 
of one thousand dollars a year. 

The courts of the new State included justices of the peace, 
courts of common pleas, a supreme court, and such other courts 
as the legislature might desire to create. ‘The supreme justices, like 
the governor, give a measure to the distance that the Ohio frontier 
had traveled from colonial precedents. They were to be ap- 
pointed not by the executive for life, which was and remains the 
practice of English law, but by joint ballot of the two houses of the 
legislature, to “hold their office for the term of seven years, if so 


128 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


long they behave well.” Like other civil officers they were re- 
movable by impeachment and conviction. 

In the legislature, the supreme power of the democratic people 
found its expression. The apportionment was based on the white 
male population over twenty-one, which of itself gave an advan- 
tage to the newer regions where young men predominated, and 
women and children were less numerous than in the older settle- 
ments. The franchise was granted to the same group, if only they 
“have paid, or are charged with, a State or county tax.” Those of 
them who were of military age and so subject to duty, constituted 
the militia of the State; and their officers, including the grade 
of brigadier-general, were elected by the men whom they com- 
manded. The statement of the “general, great, and essential 
principles of liberty and free government,” that takes up nearly a 
third of the length of the constitution, begins with the harmonious 
note that “all men are born equally free and independent.” 

In less than a month the convention at Chillicothe reduced to 
writing a statement of basic principles and rules of government 
that lasted until 1851 without revision. When the draft was 
finished, the men who made it proclaimed it the constitution, to be 
effective when the laws of the territory should cease. They not 
only felt free to perform the final act of ratification themselves, 
but they begged the assent of Congress to a boundary more gener- 
ous than the Enabling Act authorized, and in violation of the 
Ordinance of 1787. 

The boundaries of Ohio, as fixed in the Enabling Act, were those 
of the Ordinance, with a western line drawn through the mouth of 
the Great Miami, and a northern line through the southern tip of 
Lake Michigan. In the Ohio convention objection was made to 
this because of the topographic uncertainty as to the location of 
the south shore of Lake Erie. Men who had hunted in the north 
suggested that the northern hne of the Enabling Act might easily 
run south of Lake Erie, and so separate Ohio from a lake frontage. 
It was accordingly provided that if the Enabling Act line should 
strike Lake Erie east of the Maumee River, or should miss it en- 
tirely, the northern boundary should, “‘ with the assent of the Con- 
gress”’ be a line drawn from the southern tip of Lake Michigan to 
the “most northerly cape”’ of the bay at the mouth of the Maumee 
where Toledo now stands. 

Congress failed to give the desired assent for a matter of thirty- 
five years, but it recognized Ohio as a State in the Union by act of 


OHIO: THE CLASH OF PRINCIPLES 129 


February 19, 1803, in which it paid no attention to the suggested 
boundary change. The new State maintained that silence gave 
assent and eventually carried its point, after a vigorous contro- 
versy with its northern neighbor, Michigan, that struggled against 
the nibbling process at its southeast corner. 

First of the public domain States and first to be nursed by Con- 
gress through all the stages of development, Ohio received from 
the United States the first of the land endowments that have since 
characterized the American colonial policy. The Ordinance of 
1787 contained generous words for the encouragement of educa- 
tion. In the Enabling Act, section sixteen of every township of the 
public lands was granted “‘to the inhabitants of such township, 
for the use of schools.”’ It was, in addition, provided that certain 
salt springs should be given to the State, and that five per cent of 
net proceeds of the sale of lands in Ohio should “be applied to the 
_ laying out and making public roads” in Ohio, and thence to the 
“navigable waters emptying into the Atlantic.” In return for 
these grants the State agreed to leave tax-free for five years every 
parcel of land sold within its limits by the United States. 

The new State government took hold in Ohio in March, 1803, 
with Edward Tiffin as the first governor. Among the earliest acts 
of its legislature was one incorporating the Miami Exporting . 
Company, which became the first Ohio bank, and was expected to 
provide a paper money and advance the trade of the people with 
New Orleans and the outside world. At the moment of the act 
there was still uncertainty whether this outlet down the great 
river was to remain in hostile hands or to become American. It 
had just become known beyond doubt that Napoleon Bonaparte 
had acquired it, and that the local authorities had abolished the 
American right of deposit in New Orleans. Jefferson had just sent 
James Monroe as special envoy to France to try to buy a part of 
Louisiana, and he knew as well as did the men of the West that if 
the free use of the Mississippi should cease the Union would fall 
apart. That the first public land State should not be the last, de- 
pended in great measure upon his success in procuring an enlarge- 
ment of the United States. 


CHAPTER XV 
THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA 


Tue leader of a rising opposition party nearly always finds a 
dilemma before him when the turn of the tide places him in the 
position of power and responsibility. In opposition it is safe 
to attack whatever the administration may do, and there is no 
means of testing the soundness of the criticism. In office, affairs 
look different. The theorist must test his capacity for the practical. 
Thomas Jefferson had no more than taken his oath of office in 
1801 than there arose to haunt him his beloved France in the guise 
of a barrier to American unity and peace, and his own teachings 
upon the meaning of the Constitution as an inspiration to frontier 
self-determination. | 

The background of this new crisis was one of rosy hope for peace 
and growth. The new land act, and the final stages in the develop- 
ment of Ohio, were promises of sympathetic rule of the frontier 
regions. The surplus crops of the West were finding their way to 
a market. From the farm where they were grown, which was often 
on a stream navigable to light craft in early spring, the cargoes of 
wheat and corn, meal and flour, pork, bacon, and whiskey, found 
their way to the broad waters of the Ohio and Mississippi. In flat- 
boats and barges, manned by local talent at the sweeps, they were 
floated south. In the long trip, drifting by day, and tied to some 
convenient shore at night, the farmer boatmen had time to gossip 
over the trade in which they ventured. The Mississippi dominated 
not their whole lives but their balance of profit. Before 1795, 
when Pinckney signed his Spanish treaty, the cruise to Natchez 
or New Orleans had been full of risk. The temper of Spanish 
officers was mercurial. It was always possible that they would en- 
force the law, which meant confiscation of cargo, and perhaps im- 
prisonment. Whether they would succumb to bribery, and per- 
mit the speculator to share his profits with them, was uncertain 
until it was too late to give up the voyage. But after 1795 the 
right of deposit at New Orleans made the trade safe, and tempted 
its increase. The privilege was for three years, but at its expiration 
in 1798 the authorities took no step to reéstablish the former order; 
and the wars in Kurope made a strong market that welcomed at 


THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA 131 


New Orleans the up-river crops. Natchez had meanwhile become 
the chief named place in Mississippi Territory, and the southwest 
corner of American power. 

There was peace with France when Jefferson took office. The 
vexatious war of 1798 was over. The breach occasioned by the 
rapacity of the Directorate was healed by the overture of Na- 
poleon, who invited John Adams to send him new commissioners. 
In a convention signed September 30, 1800, peace was established 
and indemnity was promised to those who had suffered at French 
hands. No foreign situation was more repugnant to Jefferson 
than hostility with France, save possibly an alliance with England 
which such hostility might engender. But he had been in office 
only a few months when the rumor leaked out, and would not 
down, that on the day after the convention with the United States 
was signed Napoleon had signed another with Spain that made it 
useless. To formal inquiry as to the existence of this other treaty, 
Napoleon blandly lied. But it was true that at San Ildefonso, on 
October 1, Spain had retroceded to France the Province of Louisi- 
ana that she had received from Louis XV in 1763. Napoleon had 
pledged himself here, never to alienate Louisiana to another power, 
and was forming visions of a rebuilt colonial empire with which to 
rival England. 

The repeated denials of official France that such a transfer was 
contemplated were matched by specific news that it had taken 
place. In October, 1802, the Spanish agents at New Orleans 
confirmed the rumor by closing the Mississippi, under secret 
orders from the Spanish king. The privilege that Spain had 
tolerated since 1798, when the right of deposit expired, came to an 
end at the moment when Spain ceased to be a Mississippi Valley 
power. The bad news rushed up the trail from Natchez, and 
reaching Washington apprised the President that either the West 
would act, or he; and that his action must be prompt or not at all. 

He knew his West. The independence that made it ready for 
lawless ventures, and that had shown itself in a willingness to 
intrigue either with Spain or against her, had been part of his 
arsenal to be used against the Federalists. The slack bond that 
held it to the Union, with the Appalachian barrier to keep it re- 
mote and the Mississippi to turn its eyes southwest, had made the 
western leaders receptive when in 1798 he preached a doctrine of 
limited government and suggested a right to nullify. He knew the 
real importance of the Mississippi and the passionate regard in 


132 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


which the West held it. And he knew as well that New Orleans lay. 
unprotected at the mercy of a frontier expedition. Such attack 
was likely to produce either the calamity of a war with France, or 
a dissolution of the Union, or both. 

On the other hand, Jefferson both hated war and believed, in 
the bottom of his heart, that he lacked the power to avoid it. 
**Peace is our passion,” he wrote; and meant it. In his mind war 
could be avoided simply by refraining from it. That it could or 
would be forced upon a nation, or that there were other conditions 
worse than war, he doubted. His instinct led him, in the open, to 
play for time, and to decry the talk of war. In private, the crisis 
forced him to realize that French control of the Mississippi meant 
war with France and alliance with England, or else explosion. 

Yet when he came to consider that a purchase of a part of Louisi- 
ana from France, so that the United States might be at least co- 
owner of the river mouth, was the only probable means of averting 
war, he hesitated, for he believed that the United States had no 
constitutional right to make the purchase. No one more than he 
had fulminated against abuse of power. His Attorney-General, 
Levi Lincoln, confirmed him in the belief that it would be uncon- 
stitutional; and Jefferson with his own hand drew up an amend- 
ment to the Constitution to make it right. But his friends advised 
him to act at once, and the real westerners among them, although 
they had endorsed his Kentucky resolutions without objections, 
saw no reason why the United States lacked power to expand. To 
his eternal credit the statesman in him rose above the politician 
and the doctrinaire. In the words of Henry Adams he “ordered 
his ministers at Paris to buy this territory, although he thought 
the Constitution gave him no power to do so; he was willing to in- 
crease the national debt for this purpose, even though a national 
debt was a ‘mortal canker’; and he ordered his minister, in case 
Bonaparte should close the Mississippi, to make a permanent 
alliance with England, or in his own words to ‘marry ourselves to 
the British fleet and nation,’ as the price of New Orleans and 
Florida.”’ 

In January, 1803, Congress was asked to provide a special fund, 
and James Monroe was nominated as minister to France. The 
fund was for the purchase; the minister was to assure the impatient 
West that the Government was not asleep. The resident minister 
in Paris, Robert R. Livingston, who might as well have been in- 
structed to make the overture, was advised of Monroe’s approach, 


THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA 133 


and noted in a sudden change of Bonaparte’s policy that it might 
be possible to have the act accomplished before Monroe arrived. 

No historian has gone further than Henry Adams in describing 
the play of forces around Napoleon that led him to codperate with 
the desire of Thomas Jefferson.! It was not a fear of losing the 
province that moved him; nor the purchase price; nor the danger 
of making an enemy of America. His hope of founding an Ameri- 
can empire had collapsed, and he possessed a rare self-restraint 
that stopped him from sending good money after bad. Already he 
had taken a step in the direction of New Orleans by sending an 
army to the island of San Domingo to occupy it and make of it a 
naval base. But in San Domingo the native revolt led by Tous- 
saint L’Ouverture, and the yellow fever, swallowed up his force. 
He was unwilling to pay the price of conquest, and revived his 
hopes with a new project in the invasion of England. With the 
English war renewed, he knew he could not hold Louisiana against 
_ the English navy; hence he welcomed a chance to salvage some- 
thing, and pass the province over to the United States. Before 
Monroe arrived in Paris, Livingston was in the thick of the dis- 
cussion of price and terms, at Napoleon’s own suggestion. On 
April 30, 1803, the two envoys dated the treaty by which they 
bought for the United States not merely the island on which New 
Orleans is situated, but the whole province. 

The terms of the Louisiana Purchase were staggering to Monroe 
and Livingston, whose instructions contemplated nothing so ex- 
tensive. The purchase price was sixty million francs, or, at the 
rate of exchange agreed to in the treaty, $11,250,000. In addition 
to this the United States agreed to pay the claims of American 
citizens against France for war depredations prior to the conven- 
tion of September 30, 1800, an amount estimated at $3,750,000. 
The inhabitants of the ceded territory were to be incorporated in 
the United States, under the Constitution, “‘as soon as possible.” 
And the ships of France and Spain were to be given special privi- 
leges in Louisiana ports for a term of twelve years, after which the 
ships of France were to be placed upon the footing of the most 
favored nation. In return for this price, the United States re- 
ceived the province of Louisiana “as fully and in the same man- 


1 Adams, McMaster, and Channing have traced this transaction in great detail; its diplo- 
matic correspondence is accessible in the American State Papers, Foreign Relations, and 
more conveniently in a compilation made at the time of the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Stats 
Papers and Correspondence bearing upon the Purchase of the Territory of Louisiana (57th 
Congress, 2d Session, House Document 431). 


oe 


134 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ner,” as France received it from Spain in the Treaty of San Ilde- 
fonso, namely “‘with the same extent that it now has in the hands 
of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it; and such as it 
should be after the Treaties subsequently entered into between 
Spain and other States.”? No boundaries were mentioned, and 
none were intended. If a controversy over them should arise be- 
tween the United States and Spain, that was none of Napoleon’s 
business, and may have been his desire, since the happiness of the 
United States was not included among his ambitions. Such as it 
was, Monroe and Livingston bought the province, and sent the 
treaty home for Jefferson to worry through the Senate. 

With the ratification of the Louisiana Purchase the frontier had 
little special concern. It wanted the territory and felt none of the 
constitutional qualms that had distressed Jefferson. The Federal- 
ists of New England were thrown into the opposition and the 
minority, and now experienced fears of executive usurpation and 
constitutional violation that they would have scoffed at when in 
office. They fought in vain the ratification of the treaty, and the 
appropriation of the funds to pay for Louisiana. Over their ob- 
jections the transaction was consummated, and Congress passed as 
well the necessary laws to authorize an American government at 
New Orleans in place of that of Spain and France. 

The actual transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France had not 
taken place, and France never took the trouble to set up a colonial 
establishment. Late in the fall of 1803, France took a formal pos- 
session of Louisiana at New Orleans, and delivered it at once, 
December 20, 1803, to the agents of the United States, James 
Wilkinson and William C. C. Claiborne. The upper portion of the 
province was transferred in the spring of 1804 to Meriwether 
Lewis, whose presence at St. Louis was in connection with ascheme 
of Jefferson’s for the investigation of Louisiana. 

Within a few days of the nomination of James Monroe as minis- 
ter to France, Jefferson sent a secret message to Congress asking 
authority for a venture whose meaning and propriety were then 
and still remain uncertain. He asked an appropriation to pay the 
cost of a reconngissance of the Missouri Valley. Since this was 
French territory and he had no idea of its purchase as yet, the 
enterprise looks like an encroachment upon the rights of a country 
with which the United States was at peace. He planned to make 
the investigation with a detachment of the United States army, 
under military discipline. If his motive was not science alone, but 


THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA 135 


possible preparation for a war of seizure, there was a special 
reason for his desire to keep the matter secret. Before the money 
was ready and the men were found, the consummation of the pur- 
chase removed all question of the reasonableness of the explora- 
tion; but it cannot yet be stated with certainty the part which it 
played in American policy at the moment of its proposal. 

It is quite possible that Jefferson’s motive may have been en- 
tirely scientific. His was an active mind and he found time to 
explore the whole field of scientific attainment as well as the 
intricacies of politics. His friends found him alert to new ideas, 
and those who had business with him more than once complained 
that they could not detach him from his speculations — or hold 
him to the exclusive consideration of one of these. In his work 
with the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, he found 
exercise for this side of his activities. As early as the Revolution 
_ he recorded a hope that it might be possible to send an expedition 
up the Mississippi and the Missouri and lift their topography and 
resources from the limbo of conjecture to a state of fact. As Presi- 
dent, he could control resources that made this possible. Congress 
found the money in 1803; Jefferson found a leader for the party in 
a young friend, Meriwether Lewis; and Lewis selected as his sec- 
ond in command the brother of the conqueror of the Illinois 
country, William Clark. 

The expedition of Lewis and Clark was organized in the summer 
of 1803, under instructions from the President dated June 20. It 
was to ascend the Missouri to its source, cross the continental 
divide, and descend the Columbia River to its mouth. It was to 
search for a route across the continent, and while doing this was to 
observe and record the lay of the land, the races of Indians that 
resided there, and the animal and vegetable resources. ‘Trappers 
had long hunted over much of the region im question, and the 
Jesuit fathers had carried the influence of France to many of the 
tribes, but there was no description of Louisiana that could be 
relied upon for accurate information. Every member of the party 
was ordered to keep a record of the trip, was provided with note- 
books and a water-proof cover for his papers, and was directed to 
keep his journal by him at all times. If there had been as much 
care taken to procure men trained to know the meaning of what 
they saw, as there was to procure a record and keep it safe, the 
expedition might have added much to the store of facts. But the 
men enrolled were sturdy products of the frontier, whose literary 


136 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


habits were untrained. They were able to live in the remote wilder- 
ness, but none of them was a scientist in thought or disposition. 
There was not even a professional physician among them, and no 
formal preparation was made for dealing with the miscellaneous 
Indian tribes who might block their way. The party was heavily 
armed and stocked with trading goods; but when Lewis wanted to 
converse with the Indians, he was forced to rely upon his mulatto 
body servant, who by chance spoke French. This servant trans- 
lated the message to Charbonneau, one of the French guides, who 
could render it into the dialect he used in talking to his Indian 
wife, Sacajawea. She in turn translated it again into whatever 
tongue was necessary as the party met tribe after tribe along their 
way. She was a squaw of western origin who had been handed 
east among the tribes as a prisoner of war, and had taken on 
linguistic training as she came. With three translations between 
himself and the Indian chiefs, Lewis could not hope for intimate or 
accurate converse. 

The enlisted men of the expedition were picked up where they 
could be found, according to their fitness for a prolonged trip. 
They mobilized at Pittsburgh and followed the river route past 
the new State of Ohio, and the older Kentucky, until they reached 
the Illinois shore, opposite St. Louis. Here they stayed for the 
winter of 1803-1804, because the Spanish officers at St. Louis 
would not honor their passports and were not instructed to give 
up the province. In March, Lewis was made the agent to receive 
the transfer, and on May 14, 1804, he led his band of thirty-two 
across the Mississippi and up the Missouri. They advanced in 
three small boats, ten miles or less a day, rowing, poling, towing, 
and pulling on ropes that they fastened to the shore. Their hunt- 
ing parties marched with them, along the banks, shooting fresh 
meat and observing the country. When Lewis went ashore, Clark 
stayed with the boats. They found the Indians numerous, and 
generally friendly. Often hungry and always bored with their un- 
limited diet of meat, the Indians were greedy for sugar, molasses, 
coffee, and whiskey. They were willing petty thieves, but as yet 
they had little reason to be hostile to the whites; and the diseases 
occasioned by contact between the races were not yet serious. 

After six months of laborious ascent, the expedition reached the 
village of the Mandan Sioux, where the Northern Pacific Railroad 
now crosses the Missouri; and here it went into winter quarters 
for 1804-1805. In the five months spent among the Mandan, the 


THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA 137 


nature of the fur trade was forced upon their attention. The only 
resource the Indian had with which to enrich his life was fur. The 
traders who bought his pelts, paid low prices for them in blankets, 
ammunition, guns, and household tools, and maintained head- 
quarters without regard to nationality. Lewis found English 
traders on the Upper Missouri, and saw the profits of the traffic 
passing to the Hudson’s Bay Company or its rivals at Montreal. 
The summer of 1805 carried *he expedition from the Missouri to 
the Pacific. When they crossed the divide they left anything that 
could be called Louisiana behind them and entered a region where 
the scanty claims of foreign powers were divided among Russia, 
Spain, England, and the United States. They spent the next 
winter in a fort which they built at the mouth of the Columbia 
River, and in September, 1806, were back again at St. Louis. 
The results of the Lewis and Clark expedition were not commen- 
surate with the effort or the success that attended it. In a geo- 
graphic way it greatly enlarged our knowledge of America. It 
made new and original contacts with many tribes of Indians. It 
provided descriptions, had any one cared to read them, of the 
Missouri and Columbia valleys. But it was many years before a 
fair compilation of the journals was prepared, and the century 
was nearly gone before the first critical edition appeared. Patrick 
Gass, one of the soldier-diarists, published his journal at Pitts- 
burgh in 1807, in a small edition. Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia 
began to edit them in 1811, but the war with England was a dis- 
traction, and his work did not appear until 1814.2 Before the 
party arrived back at St. Louis the world had so changed that, 
whatever the original idea of Jefferson may have been, it was no 
longer a vital thing. If he feared the necessity to seize Louisiana, 
and was preparing a military survey, the ease with which the 
transfer had been accomplished destroyed it. No power contested 
the purchase, though Spain showed an irritation at being de- 
frauded by Napoleon. If he hoped to make great scientific dis- 
coveries, the journals must have disappointed him for they con- 
tained nothing startling. By 1807 there was danger of war with 


2 Elliott Coues, History of the Expedition under the Command of Lewis and Clark (1893), 
was the first critical edition. It is still useful, although for matters of definitive erudition it 
is supplanted by Reuben G. Thwaites, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 
1804-1806 (1904-1905). There is a convenient summary in R. G. Thwaites, Brief History of 
Rocky Mountain Exploration with especial Reference to the Expedition of Lewis and Clark 
(1904). Thwaites prepared himself for this work by editing Jesucé Relations and allied Docu- 
ments, 1610-1791 (73 vols., 1896-1901). 


1388 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


England. After that date the United States was being drawn step 
by step into the meshes of European politics, and Jefferson had 
little leisure to play the man of science. Not until after 1815 was 
the time ripe for a profitable interest in the trans-Mississippi; and 
then the legend was already in formation to which the remarks of 
Lewis and Clark gave credence: — that, after all, the country 
beyond the Missouri River was not fit for white habitation or use. 

In 1806, the last year in which Lewis and Clark were in the 
field, another fragment was added to the scanty knowledge of the 
contents of the purchase by a lieutenant in the regular army, 
Zebulon Montgomery Pike. With a detachment of twenty-one 
men, in a good-sized keel boat, he was sent by General Wilkinson 
to ascertain the source of the Mississippi River. 

At the time of the peace negotiations at Paris in 1782-1783 the 
best maps that were available indicated that the source of the 
Mississippi was well north of its real position. Counting on this, 
the boundary there described ran the line from the Lake of the 
Woods “‘on a due west course to the river Mississippi.” It was 
impossible ever to mark this line, since no part of the Mississippi 
is as far north as the northwest angle of the Lake of the Woods. 
The defect in description of boundary was attempted to be cured 
by a convention signed in London by the American minister, 
Rufus King, in May, 1803, in which a direct line connected the 
source of the Mississippi and the Lake of the Woods. This treaty 
was never ratified, and there remained an uncertainty as to the 
Canadian boundary for another fifteen years. 

Wilkinson sent Pike to ascertain the source at a time when the 
snow and ice of winter made it quite impossible to determine which 
of the swampy lakes of central Minnesota it really was.? Ascend- 
ing the Mississippi, Pike found above St. Louis almost no signs of 
white habitation. In the lead country, from which in later years 
the northwest frontier was to draw the material for its bullets 
and shot, he saw and described the primitive workings of Julian 
Dubuque, who had been operating on the west bank of the river 
for some years. On the east bank, at the mouth of the Wisconsin, 
he found the ancient trading post of Prairie du Chien. Above this 
point the Indian country was unbroken. The Sioux awaited him 
at the mouth of the Minnesota River, and here he treated with 


3 Elliott Coues, The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike to the Headwaters of the 
Mississippi River, through Louisiana Territory, and in New Spain, during the years 1806- 
6-7 (1895). 


THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA . 139 


them and took possession of the land as American soil. It was not 
a needless act, for the agents of the Montreal fur traders were 
here, as they were on the upper Missouri, and he found the English 
flag flying over their lodges. Not until 1819 was a permanent 
American post established here. In January, 1806, Pike deter- 
mined upon Leech Lake as the source of the river, in which he was 
in error, and started back to St. Louis to report. By the date of 
his arrival there in April, the Mississippi Valley was astir with 
rumors of war and speculation, Wilkinson was treading a difficult 
course between treason and patriotism, and the fate of Louisiana 
was in the balance. The purchase of Louisiana had been com- 
pleted, but while Jefferson was taking the measure of its physical 
contents, Aaron Burr was sounding its intellectual and moral 
depths, and tempting the ambitious leaders of the West with 
visions that perhaps were cloudy even to himself. 


CHAPTER XVI 
PROBLEMS OF THE SOUTHWEST BORDER 


NAPOLEON BoNAPaARTE refused to go on record as to the bound- 
aries of Louisiana, but we know to-day that it was his intention, 
had he completed his colonial experiment, to seize the Gulf of 
Mexico shore between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande, and 
claim it all.1 When the province that he discarded into Jefferson’s 
hands became the southwest border of the United States, its west- 
ern limits were uncertain. And Spain, who had watched with 
apprehension the advance of both England and France, viewed 
with renewed alarm the presence at New Orleans of an American 
frontier force. The settlements in Texas had been planted in the 
eighteenth century to be a buffer for New Spain, the Internal 
Provinces had been organized, and Upper California had been 
colonized with the same intent. The Spanish officers who from 
New Orleans had watched the leaders of opinion in Kentucky and 
Tennessee with nervous fear since 1785, now took their station 
along the trail that ran from the head of the Sabine River to San 
Antonio, and determined to maintain an outpost here. In Louisi- 
ana, James Wilkinson was an unfit leader of the American army, 
for no one had illicit relations more than he with these Spanish 
officials. He was an unstable foundation for the cornerstone of 
empire. 

After the delivery of New Orleans to Wilkinson and Claiborne 
in December, 1803, the latter became temporary governor, exercis- 
ing in the name of the President full military power, and all the 
functions possessed by all the Spanish officials whom he displaced. 
Congress authorized such autocratic rule until it should have time 
to give further consideration to the government of the province. 
There were in Louisiana perhaps eight thousand whites in the 
vicinity of New Orleans, and fifty thousand south of the Red 
River. In Upper Louisiana, between New Madrid and St. Louis, 
there may have been six thousand more. Most of these were 
French or Spanish, though there was among them a new admixture 


1 The best treatments of these boundary matters are Isaac J. Cox, The West Florida 
Controversy, 1798-1813 (1918), and Thomas M. Marshall, A History of the Western Boundary 
of the Louisiana Purchase, 1819-1841 (1914). 


PROBLEMS OF THE SOUTHWEST BORDER 141 


of Americans, tempted across the Mississippi by easy naturaliza- 
tion and generous land grants. The people spoke French, lived 
under the civil rather than the common law, and were in general 
devout followers of the communion of the Catholic Church. They 
contained little of the element that made American westerners 
clamor for self-government before they were ripe for it. Instead, 
the creoles of Louisiana, with the numerous half-breed mixtures, 
accepted what government came to them with tranquil indiffer- 
ence. Their normal indolent politeness did not conceal their con- 
tempt for the American representatives of a rough and ready 
civilization, but they made no resistance to their sale as chattels 
by France to the United States. 

In March, 1804, Congress divided the province of Louisiana by 
the line of the thirty-third parallel running west from the Missis- 
sippi. South of this line, the Territory of Orleans was left in Clai- 
_ borne’s hands, as a territory of the lowest grade. North of the 
line, the District of Louisiana was attached for purposes of govern- 
ment to Indiana Territory, where William Henry Harrison had 
been in command since 1801. This latter combination was unsuc- 
cessful, and popular neither at Vincennes nor at St. Louis. In 
1805, accordingly, Indiana was cut down. Michigan Territory 
was launched, with seat of government at Detroit, under William 
Hull; and Louisiana District was allowed to be a Territory, with 
its government at St. Louis. Both Indiana and Orleans at this 
time were raised to the second territorial status, and allowed a 
legislature. 

The exploration of the tract that thus became the two territories 
of Orleans and Louisiana went on apace. Between 1804 and 1806 
the northern and western limits were visited, without discovering 
anything that called for or received immediate attention. But at 
the south and west each year revealed increasing difficulty and 
uncertainty. Pike, on his return from the Upper Mississippi was 
transferred at once to this scene, and played there a part whose 
meaning is as uncertain to the historian as it may have been to 
him. 

Under orders from Wilkinson, he left St. Louis July 15, 1806, to 
escort a group of Indians to their homes in the Osage and Pawnee 
villages, and then to proceed to the headwaters of the Arkansas 
and Red rivers. The internal topography was as cloudy at the 
border of New Spain as it was at that of Oregon. There would 
have been good reason for an investigation of the region for the 


142 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


simple purpose of ascertaining the facts, but the connection of 
Wilkinson with it makes such explanation of motive hard to ac- 
cept. Somewhere to the southwest lay the frontier of Spain. It 
was fairly clear that on the Gulf Shore there would be established 
an equilibrium not far from the Sabine River; but inland neither 
Spain nor the United States knew what the limits ought to be. 
Pike was ordered to disguise his military identity, which would not 
have been necessary had his purpose been simply to explore the 
Territory of Louisiana; and he was given careful instructions and 
an untruthful story to be used in case he should fall in with troops 
of Spain. Like a good soldier he accepted his orders without ques- 
tion, and he does not seem to have suspected that anything but a 
proper military purpose was behind his mission. When he returned 
to the United States in 1807, and found that he was connected in 
the public mind with the plot of Aaron Burr, his indignation was 
s0 pronounced as to appear genuine. 

Leaving the St. Louis border with his Indian charges, Pike 
visited their villages, and then struck off across what is now the 
eastern end of Kansas for the great northern bend of the Arkansas 
River. He followed the river to the Rocky Mountains, where it 
emerges through the front range at the Royal Gorge, where 
Pueblo now stands. From an examination of such maps as he 
could have seen, there was reason to believe that south of the 
Arkansas was the basin of the Red River. Certainly in their lower 
reaches these rivers lay parallel. The Sangre de Cristo range that 
Pike now crossed may have appeared to him to be the northern 
ridge of the Red River basin; but when he struck the stream be- 
yond the range, which was the Rio Grande in San Luis Park, he 
built himself a fortified post on it. If he thought it to be the Red 
River, there was no occasion for a fort. If he knew it was the Rio 
Grande, he must have been conscious of a trespass, for his fort 
was on a western branch of the main stream. But he also knew 
that on the border, people were talking of a probable war with 
Spain. His commander, Wilkinson, had proceeded during the 
summer first to Natchez and then to the head of Red River naviga- 
tion at Natchitoches, where he went through the motions of mak- 
ing a truce with the Spanish leaders who were in the vicinity of 
Nacogdoches. Between them they held the international bound- 
ary near the point where it was fixed by treaty in 1819. But while 
they were doing this downstream, Pike was building his fort upon 
the Rio Grande, and claiming that he thought himself upon the Red. 


PROBLEMS OF THE SOUTHWEST BORDER = 143 


In February, 1807, Pike was visited at his camp by a courteous 
Spanish officer, with a detachment of soldiers and militia, and was 
invited to accompany him to his commander at Chihuahua. The 
force was so great that compliance could not be avoided. The 
Spanish relieved Pike of all his notes and papers, which were for- 
warded through military channels to headquarters at Mexico City 
(though no one seems ever to have read them).?, The Americans 
were escorted as guests down the road that ascends the upper Rio 
Grande. They passed through Sante Fé, where New Spain had a 
civilization as ancient as that of New England. They continued to 
El Paso, where the river leaves the mountain trough that has 
become New Mexico; and thence they crossed the desert of Chi- 
huahua. Spain had no use for Pike, though it desired to check his 
reconnoissance; and the impeding war failed to come about. From 
Chihuahua, therefore, Pike was escorted to the eastern road that 
_ led, and still leads, from Durango to Laredo, and thence across the 
Rio Grande to San Antonio. In the summer of 1807 he was passed 
along the whole length of the Texas road to Nacogdoches, and was 
delivered across the neutral ground to Wilkinson at Natchitoches. 

By the time of Pike’s arrival at the American border post, what- 
ever may have been the original intention of Wilkinson in dis- 
patching him had changed to patriotism and peace. Aaron Burr 
had been arrested, and the word treason had been noisily shouted 
at his followers. Pike found himself misjudged and minus the 
notes which might have made a valuable book upon his trip. 
However, his reputation was not permanently destroyed and he 
died a brigadier-general under fire at York in 1813. He had mean- 
time brought out in 1810 a volume whose chief contribution lies in 
establishing the topographical data respecting the sources of the 
Arkansas and the Red and in describing the remote civilization of 
New Mexico. The picturesque life that Pike was taken through 
upon his enforced pilgrimage was new to him and interesting to his 
fellows. The scarcity of merchandise in New Mexico suggested a 
profitable field for border trade. But the time was not yet ripe for 
this. Santa Fé was a thousand miles away from St. Louis across 
the southern plains, whose inhospitality impressed Pike, as the 
northern plains had similarly impressed Lewis and Clark. 


2 These very papers were finally discovered by Herbert E. Bolton on one of his many 
visits to the Mexican archives. He found them covered by the dust of generations, and 
printed them so that all might see how valuable Pike was as an observer, in “Papers of 
Z. M. Pike,”’ in American Historical Review, vol. Xt. 


144 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


The mystery connected with the aims of Aaron Burr, and the. 
devious course of James Wilkinson respecting them, is involved 
with the genuine tenseness of Spanish-American relations, and the 
old habit of the Mississippi Valley lightly to undertake ventures 
inconsistent with Federal law and duty. The arrest of Burr in 
January, 1807, brought his enterprise to an end, and was followed 
by peace and reaction in the West. He serves as a convenient 
scale upon which to measure frontier potentialities. 

Aaron Burr was still in middle life and a national figure, when 
his career was suddenly terminated in 1804. He rose to power and 
repute through his skill in walking the shady paths of New York 
politics. Here as an organizer of Jeffersonian principles he became 
a democratic leader whose practical grip upon the vote gave him 
as much influence as Jefferson possessed with his power over the 
minds of men. He could not attain this position without brushing 
more than once against the sterner side of Alexander Hamilton, 
who as Federalist leader of the State and confidant of Washington, 
held a national position superior to his own. There have been 
times when the rival bosses of New York politics have at heart 
been friends, and in collusion against the public, but between 
Hamilton and Burr there was deep distrust and a genuine con- 
tempt. 

The prominence of Burr led to his downfall. In 1800 by agree- 
ment among the Jeffersonian leaders, he became Jefferson’s mate 
upon the party ticket. Under the Constitution the electors would 
ballot for two names, and the one receiving the largest number of 
votes would become President. But when the Democratic- 
Republicans determined upon their candidates it was clear to all 
that Jefferson was the party choice for President. The victory of 
1800 was sweeping. Jefferson and Burr received more votes than 
their Federalist opponents, but the party organization was so 
effective that every Jeffersonian elector voted for both Jefferson 
and Burr, with the result that there was a tie that could be settled 
only by an election in the House of Representatives. This defect 
in the Constitution was corrected by the Twelfth Amendment; but 
in 1800 the contest produced a stubborn fight whose sole founda- 
tion was the lack of principle of Burr. He knew that morally no 
one had voted for him for President and that the course of honor 
was to procure the immediate election of Jefferson by the House. 
He nevertheless allowed his friends, and he had many, to try to 
secure the coveted post for him. The House was divided, with the 


PROBLEMS OF THE SOUTHWEST BORDER = 145 


Federalist minority holding the balance of power, and with the 
personal enemy of Burr, Alexander Hamilton, holding the confi- 
dence of the Federalists. In the end, and through the efforts of 
Hamilton, Jefferson was seated; and to Hamilton is attributed the 
profound remark that though Jefferson had bad principles, Burr 
had none. Burr became Vice President, with his party turned 
against him because of his treachery, and with the personal anti- 
pathy to Hamilton deep and implacable. 

On July 11, 1804, Burr killed Hamilton in a duel fought near the 
heights at Weehawken where there was a long-established habit of 
settling such New York disputes. These contests were frequent 
enough in American life in the eighteenth century, and the acci- 
dent of killing an opponent was one that might easily happen to 
any gentleman. It was inconvenient, but not incurable. But 
Aaron Burr was already notorious, and Hamilton was a great 
national figure. Instead of easy forgiveness, Burr found indict- 
ment for murder in both New York and New Jersey. After his 
disaster, dueling rapidly gave way before adverse public opinion, 
and he became a victim of a suddenly shifted standard of manners 
and ethics. He returned to Washington where as Vice President 
he was secure from actual molestation, but as his term of office 
reached completion, March 4, 1805, he was a man without a party 
or a home. He became a man without a country. 

In prospecting for a field in which to spend his later years (Burr 
was just forty-nine when he left office), his attention turned 
toward the West, which was natural because of two reasons. 
Federalism and Alexander Hamilton were so unpopular there that 
the killing of Hamilton was no affront; and personal encounters 
lasted much longer on the frontier than in the East. McMaster 
records that a traveling showman passed through Tennessee 
“exhibiting a wax figure of Burr as he appeared when he slew the 
leviathan of Federalism.’ There was here abundant opportunity 
for a man of resource and charm, and the affairs of Spain were so 
upset that almost anything might be made to happen. 

Within a few days of the death of Hamilton it was suggested to 
Anthony Merry, the British minister in Washington, that meas- 
ures for the rupture of the Union were under way. And in the 
ensuing months, Merry was led to believe that for a relatively 
small investment, £110,000 and the loan of a small fleet at New 
Orleans, England might procure this. A picture of a Mississipp1 
Valley federation dazzled his eyes, and his dispatches to the 


146 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


British Foreign Office show how fully he desired authority to 
encourage Burr. The British Government was not to be caught in 
such behavior. ‘There was no allusion in its instructions to Merry 
that the Burr dispatches had even been received. And in the sum- 
mer of 1806 Merry was mystified and chagrined to learn that he 
was to be allowed to come home on account of an ill health of 
which he was unaware. 

The Spanish minister in Washington, the Marquis of Casa 
Yrujo, heard a different story. He thought he learned through an 
emissary supposed to be from Burr that the long-expected attack 
upon New Spain was about to take place; and that for a considera- 
tion Burr would prevent the expedition from succeeding: — 
would sell it out, in short. Yrujo heard wild talk of kidnaping 
Jefferson as part of the performance. 

It is hardly to be believed that Merry and Yrujo could have 
been right, and Burr honest either with them or the United States. 
But the uncertainties that follow from a perusal of the correspond- 
ence of the English and Spanish governments are made worse by 
the tales that appear to have been told by Burr or his friends to 
the leaders of the West. In the summer of 1805 Burr, now a pri- 
vate citizen, made a trip to New Orleans by the river route. Os- 
tensibly he was looking for a place to settle down, practice law, 
and start a western political career. He was received everywhere, 
and everywhere his personal magnetism overcame what doubts 
there were as to the legality or patriotism of his intentions. He 
found one western man of fortune who placed money at his dis- 
posal, Harmon Blennerhassett who lived in semi-feudal state on 
an island near Marietta in the Upper Ohio. Blennerhassett was 
dazzled by the idea of a career of conquest and a kingdom for 
Burr that should include the spoils of Spain, Louisiana, and 
Mexico. And he saw himself ambassador at a European court. 

What Burr said to the western politicians like Andrew Jackson 
and Henry Clay, William Henry Harrison, and James Wilkinson 
can only be surmised. They may have thought it only a filibuster- 
ing expedition at the expense of Spain, or a speculation in land 
titles on the Red River. They were not likely to have been inter- 
ested in making a new king or emperor or in splitting the United 
States, now that the purchase of Louisiana had insured a western 
outlet to the sea. The evidence that exists is not enough to prove 
what Burr’s intention was; but it is sufficient to establish the fact 
that to every hearer he told the story that he thought would inter- 


PROBLEMS OF THE SOUTHWEST BORDER = 147 


est. It has been common to speak of the Burr conspiracy and call 
it treason. Adams and McMaster, in their great histories, have 
leaned this way. McCaleb, who has made the most exhaustive 
study of the plot, holds that whatever was in Burr’s concealed 
intent, it was not treason in the West.*® The looseness of the federal 
bond there had endangered the Union since the beginning, and it 
is doubtful whether many Americans had as yet taught themselves 
to believe that the Union must last forever. The natural lawless- 
ness of the border regions and the old habit of intrigue for advan- 
tage at New Orleans made the West ripe for illicit ventures. But 
as soon as the leaders of opinion heard that Jefferson called it 
treason they backed out. 

After his trip of 1805, Burr returned by sea to New York and 
organized an expedition. He sent agents, some of whom talked too 
much, to arrange for building flatboats on the Ohio and to enlist 
adventurers to follow him down the Mississippi. The West in 
1806 was filled with gossip about him, but if he was only proceed- 
ing against Spain there was no local feeling to block him. In the 
autumn he joined his parties, and in Kentucky was taken into 
court to explain himself. Henry Clay was his counsel, and con- 
vinced not only himself but the court that Burr had no evil intent. 
At Nashville it had to be explained again to Andrew Jackson; and 
Jackson, satisfied, continued to recruit for Burr. By December 
the party was again afloat, while Jefferson, now aroused by both 
his dislike of Burr and the rumors of military expeditions against 
Spain, issued a proclamation directing the conspirators to disband 
The proclamation followed Burr down the Mississippi. In Janu. 
ary, 1807, Burr abandoned his men and took to flight. James 
Wilkinson, who had been in his confidence and had appeared to 
be a part of the conspiracy, turned loyal. As commander of the 
army in the West, Wilkinson established a modus vivendi with 
Spain in November, 1806. He returned to New Orleans, warned 
Jefferson of danger, proclaimed martial law, and wrecked the 
effort. What he had promised Burr to do is not known; but what 
he did was to take the pose of savior of his country. The Spanish 


8 Walter F. McCaleb, before he turned banker, wrote the most discriminating of the 
Burr books, The Aaron Burr Conspiracy (1903); he did not give the vividness to Burr that 
is found in James Parton, Life and Times of Aaron Burr (1858), but there is more of Burr in 
his delineation than in Parton’s. Until recently the British Foreign Office kept the ill-advised 
dispatches of Anthony Merry wrapped in red tape, and sealed with a great patch of red 
wax, lest the truth be allowed to bring pain to the people whom Burr once professed to 
serve, 


148. HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


minister, Yrujo, commenting on the affair after the arrest of Burr, 
accused Wilkinson of treasonable desire, but loyalty to the Spanish 
Government that so long had pensioned him. Wilkinson would 
now, he prophesied, make application for special compensation for 
extraordinary service; ““he has sacrificed Burr in order to obtain 
... advantages.” 

The Burr conspiracy collapsed, and neither the United States 
nor Spain suffered from it. But the ease with which Burr obtained 
western aid for what was at best a shady venture, gives emphasis 
to the importance of the purchase of Louisiana as a means of hold- 
ing the Union together. The separatist western spirit was dying, 
but by no means dead. The flame of national zeal, that in the next 
decade was to make a war with England unavoidable, was un- 
lighted in 1803 and only beginning to burn in 1806. 

With Burr arrested and on trial before John Marshall on charge 
of treason, the Mississippi Valley forgot this episode, and con- 
tinued on its normal growth. The border territories, Mississippi, 
Orleans, Louisiana, Indiana, and Michigan, were increased by 
the creation of Illinois in 1809; and Louisiana, with some self- 
government after 1805, took the final steps towards the statehood 
guaranteed by the treaty of 1803. 

The State of Louisiana was added to the Union April 30, 1812. 
From 1805 to 1811 Governor Claiborne and his subjects were in 
almost continuous open breach, there being few points at which 
the creole and the frontiersman could act in unison. The precedent 
established in the case of Ohio was followed by Congress, which 
passed an enabling act early in 1811, under which a convention 
met at New Orleans on November 4. The constitution of Louisi- 
ana was frankly based upon the second Kentucky constitution, 
framed in 1799. Although the French law that had prevailed in 
the former province was continued as the legal basis for the new 
State, the influences that were most vocal and effective were not 
french. The newly arrived immigrants from the southwest seized 
control of the new establishment. The convention met on the day 
upon which, at Washington, the new Congress convened to force 
war upon an unwilling President. Louisiana was an outpost in 
that war, and among the earliest measures preliminary to war was 
an enlargement of its territory to the northeast in the direction of 
Spanish Florida. 

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase the United States raised 
the question whether the province included West Florida, but re- 


PROBLEMS OF THE SOUTHWEST BORDER = 149 


ceived no satisfaction from France.* The Gulf Shore was so im- 
portant to the development of the Southwest, whose rivers crossed 
the Spanish strip, that the United States was bound to search for a 
theory that would include West Florida in Louisiana. The fact 
was that in 1762-1763, when France ceded Louisiana to Spain and 
England, the eastern boundary of the province extended to the 
region of the Perdido River, which now forms part of the eastern 
boundary of Alabama. England received from Spain in 1763 both 
Spanish Florida and the strip that Spain had just received from 
France. This became West Florida and was an administrative 
unit under England until 1783 and under Spain thereafter. The 
language of the treaty of 1803 referred to Louisiana as it was in 
1800 in the hands of Spain, and as it had been in 1762 in the hands 
of France. By insisting upon the old French boundary, the United 
States made the point that West Florida ought to be included. 
_ By emphasizing the Louisiana that existed in 1800, Spain argued 
that West Florida was a thing apart. 

The western end of West Florida reached the Mississippi be- 
tween the thirty-first parallel and the River Iberville. Here 
American adventurers squatted before 1810, declared their inde- 
pendence of Spain, and invited annexation by the United States. 
Madison issued a proclamation in October, 1810, declaring that by 
purchase the United States extended as far east as the Perdido and 
directed Governor Claiborne to seize the territory as far as the 
Pearl River. On April 14, 1812, Congress added this tract to Lou- 
islana; while that State entered the Union on April 30. A few days 
later, the rest of the strip, from the Pearl to the Perdido, was added 
to Mississippi Territory, thus bringing Mobile within American 
claim. General Wilkinson gave the claim reality a little later by 
occupying Mobile by force. The region that England might use as 
a military base against the United States was thereby somewhat 
reduced. | 

« Herbert B. Fuller, The Purchase of Florida. Its History and Diplomacy (1906). 


CHAPTER XVII 
THE BONDS OF UNITY 


THE year in which Louisiana framed its constitution, 1811, was 
filled with significant events for the western future. There began 
at once a struggle between two forces, one disintegrating and one 
national, the one tending to develop Mississippi Valley entity at 
the expense of the United States, the other leading to a closer 
unity between the sections. As evidence of the latter, the first 
contracts for the construction of a great highway between the 
Ohio and tidewater were let in this year. As evidence of the 
former, the first steamboat floated on western waters, with a 
promise for New Orleans of a trade that could flow upstream 
against the current. In this year, also, the inevitable rivalry be- 
tween the frontier and the native Americans whom it dispossessed 
revived in new hostilities, and Tecumseh was broken on the 
Wabash. At the same time the western “war hawks” descended 
upon the national government, organized the Twelfth Congress, 
made Henry Clay Speaker of the House and brought on the second 
war with England. The earthquake that shook much of New 
Madrid into the Mississippi, and the comet that set the heavens on 
fire, are only minor phenomena in a year of great events. 

The promptness with which Jefferson acted to buy Louisiana is 
evidence of the fragile nature of the link that held the sections to- 
gether before 1803; and the near-success of Burr shows the uneasi- 
ness that could still be counted on in 1806. With all the travel 
that poured from the region above the Falls Line into the great 
valleys, and out of these into the West, the routes remained in 
1800 little easier to traverse than they had been a generation 
earlier. The old traces had become clear trails. Farms had ap- 
peared on either side, and branch paths led into innumerable com- 
munities a little off the main road west. Timber had been cut out 
and ruthlessly destroyed, for to the pioneer natural resources were 
as much an obstacle as an advantage. Oak and black walnut logs 
were felled for rude bridges or to corduroy a piece of quagmire. 
But there were no stone roads and few improvements. The toll 
ferries and bridges that enterprising men built for their own profit 
were as much exasperation as help to the migrant. And except the 


THE BONDS OF UNITY 151 


migrants, not many used the roads. There were too few wagons, 
and the ruts were too severe for hauling much of the crop from its 
place of production to any market. Unless a river provided a natu- 
ral highway the farming region generally was forced to remain 
backwoods. No common demand of the pioneer region appeared 
more promptly than one for roads; and there is none that more 
completely baffled the country of magnificent distance, scant 
population, and low taxable values. 

The European world, in the last quarter of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, was awakening to the values of easy transportation. Since 
the decay of the Roman Empire, few great roads had been made 
even in the countries of highest civilization, and life had been im- 
mobile for all but merchants and magnates. The accumulating 
wealth that came with the beginnings of the industrial revolution 
of the eighteenth century brought the costs of roads within the 
realm of practical politics, while the experiments of such engineers 
as Telford and McAdam yielded methods of wide and easy appli- 
cation. The movement for hard roads reached the United States 
before the eighteenth century was over. In its last decade Penn- 
sylvania allowed a private company to build and operate a toll 
turnpike along the highway that led from Philadelphia to Lan- 
caster and the Susquehanna. The Lancaster Pike was a marvel 
for the traveler, with its hard stone surface; and was an inspiration 
to other communities to imitate it.! 

In the Enabling Act passed for Ohio in 1802, a fund was set 
aside out of the receipts from public land sales for building roads, 
and in the following spring part of this was dedicated to a tide- 
water road. The decade was over before the fund was large enough 
to be of use, or a decision could be reached as to the precise place 
to locate the road. But the start was made. By 1805 it was decided 
to build where every one who knew the West knew it must be 
built, along the general line of Braddock’s route. From Fort 
Cumberland in Maryland, to which point it was possible to navi- 
gate the Potomac, and to which point as well the local roads of 
Maryland were passable, the new road was to go to the Ohio River 
at some spot between Wheeling and Steubenville. In this general 
region it would be as easy to build one place as another, but the 


1R. G. Thwaites, Early Western Travels, 1748-1846 (1904-1907), embraces thirty vol- 
umes of reprints of rare works of travel, and two volumes of comprehensive index. To- 
gether they constitute a gazetteer of the interior of America and are more usable than the 
originals from which they have been assembled. 


152 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


local demands that every village of western Pennsylvania must 
be reached were so peremptory that it was still some years before 
the political deadlocks could be broken. 

Jefferson was authorized in 1806 to appoint a board of three 
commissioners to lay out the Cumberland Road, and the States of 
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were asked to assent to 
construction by the Federal Government within their limits. Ex- 
cept with their permission Congress could not own nor manage the 
land on which to build it.?, The State of Pennsylvania withheld its 
consent until assured of a route acceptable to itself, and Albert 
Gallatin of Uniontown, the Secretary of the Treasury, had great 
influence upon the final choice. The route as finally selected 
started at Fort Cumberland and followed thence a line somewhat 
less than direct through Uniontown to Brownsville on the Mo- 
nongahela, to Washington, and finally to Wheeling. The combined 
influence of Kentucky and Virginia for Wheeling as a terminus 
broke down the claims advanced by Ohio for Steubenville. The 
fact that Wheeling was already the head of Zane’s Trace across 
Ohio reinforced its claim. The road, as prescribed by law, was to 
be cut four rods wide, with a raised wagon way, with ditches and 
culverts, and permanent bridges where it crossed the streams. 
Hills were to be cut and grades smoothed, and the surface was to 
be of stone whose thickness and size were commanded by the 
statute. It was 1811 before the final route was at last approved, 
and by this time there was talk of continuing the project across the 
Ohio and through the Northwest States. 

In the spring of 1811 the first contracts for building the road 
were let, mostly to farmer contractors who lived along the line. 
It was as heavy a piece of construction as had yet been undertaken 
in the United States, and many of the stone culverts and bridges 
are still serviceable in their second century of use. Before such 
actual construction had been completed, the War of 1812 broke 
out, and the work was put over until it ended. But after 1814, 
section after section was finished by the builders and turned 
over to the Government. It immediately came into heavy use — 
so heavy that before the western sections were opened in 1818, 
the eastern were worn out. The great wagons that carried freight 


2 Jeremiah S. Young, A Political and Constitutional Study of the Cumberland Road (1902). 
is more informing than most doctors’ theses; there is a wealth of picturesque detail in 
Thomas B. Seabright, The Old Pike. A History of the National Road, with Incidents, Ac- 
cidents, and Anecdotes thereon (1894), and there is a volume in Hulbert’s series. 


THE BONDS OF UNITY 158 


and farmers in endless procession cut deep ruts through the stone 
surface, and Congress made no provision to patch the holes or 
keep the road in use. 

Some of the inhibitions that affected wise and practical men a 
century ago are unintelligible to-day. There was no opposition of 
consequence against the undertaking of the Cumberland Road as 
a national work. But when it came to keeping the road in repair 
either by government toll gates that should levy the cost upon the 
user, or through direct appropriations of Federal funds raised by 
taxation, a host of constitutional objections came to life. Pictures 
were drawn for the benefit of Congress of the sad condition of the 
States if such encroachment should be allowed. The sovereignty 
and independence of the States would be disturbed, and Congress 
would become a centralized autocracy. It was unthinkable that 
the United States should operate a continuing business within a 
State without destroying it. In 1819 John Marshall laid down the 
doctrine of implied powers that eventually put these qualms to 
rest; but until after 1824 it was impossible to get Congress either to 
maintain what it had begun or to start another public improve- 
ment. 

The Cumberland Road was a symbol of Federal power, and a 
bond of union. It drew attention to something that the Nation 
was doing, rather than the States, and in a practical way it short- 
ened the time and lowered the cost of communication between the 
sections. The mails that hurried along the road carried letters 
from Washington to Wheeling in the unheard-of time of thirty 
hours; and to Indianapolis in sixty-five hours and a half. The 
whole political population of Washington that came from western 
constituencies, gathered at Cincinnati or Louisville, ascended the 
Ohio to Wheeling, and there took stage to Baltimore or Washing- 
ton. The homeseeker drove his own farm team and rode in his 
own covered Pennsylvania wagon. The average traveler for trade 
or politics found accommodations in the stage and in the inns that 
dotted the route. The professional freighters kept a constant cloud 
of dust above their slow-moving trains bound west. And the 
gentleman of means, in his own chariot or coach with his own 
servants on the box, passed between the sections at whatever rate 
he pleased. As late as 1837, when Andrew Jackson terminated his 
presidency in Washington and went back to the Hermitage in 
Tennessee to spend his declining years, he traveled thus. 

The demand of the West for an extension of the Cumberland 


154 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Road belongs to the story of the fight over internal improvements 
that protrudes from national politics from 1816 to 1830. After 
1824 the barriers were down. The following year, ground was 
broken for construction west of Wheeling, and for a project that 
was designated to thread upon a National Road all capitals of the 
western States. It was to connect Columbus, Indianapolis, and 
Vandalia (which was then the capital of Illinois), and then it was 
to cross the Mississippi at or near St. Louis, and proceed to the 
capital of Missouri. An occasional enthusiast grew romantic about 
extending it to the western boundary of the United States, or even 
to the Pacific. Once the idea of internal improvements at Federal 
cost was fixed there was no lack of local projects, and the Union 
took on for the western regions that needed aid, a shape and char- 
acter that allayed forever the danger of disunion there. 

Simultaneously with the Federal effort to bind the Union into an 
unbreakable unit, there came the change in water traffic that 
tended to emphasize the importance of New Orleans, and the sec- 
tional aspect of the West. Nicholas J. Roosevelt of New York 
sailed from Pittsburgh in the autumn of 1811 in his steamboat 
Orleans (or New Orleans) and heralded for the up-river towns the 
dawn of a new era. Heretofore the civilization of the trans- 
montane settlements had been nearly indigenous, relying upon 
local produce, and a minimum of manufactured goods from the 
outside world. The wealth that was beginning to accumulate in 
the older settlements had no outlet except in purchase of land and 
stock. There was a public wanting to buy, and able; but the 
merchandise that could be hauled over the rough trails from Phila- 
delphia or Baltimore, or be poled up the Mississippi in keel boats, 
was always less than what was needed, and ever more costly than 
was reasonable. The inland exasperation at the high freight rates — 
of common earriers that to-day gives so much of the spirit to 
western politics, showed itself in 1811 in futile protests against the 
prohibitions laid by nature, and in eager welcome for roads and 
steamboats. 

The use of steam was the prime influence in the industrial revo- 
lution. Early in the eighteenth century the attention of inventors 
was centered upon the construction of stationary steam engines 
that could be used to work pumps and lift loads. Soon they began 
to hitch them to textile machinery and the factory era was 
brought about. At an early date they experimented in the desire 
to make them travel on land or sea; and there are quaint steam 


THE BONDS OF UNITY 155 


carriages of that century whose designers would be quite at home 
in the age of gas internal combustion engines. The problems set by 
the marine engine and the locomotive were so different that the 
former was of necessity solved first. On land there could be no 
smooth roadbed upon which the locomotive could function with- 
out shaking itself to pieces. Indeed until the use of the pneumatic 
tire the land engine was substantially confined to tracks. But in a 
boat, on quiet waters, the engine could and did run smoothly at an 
early date. There was a steamboat on the Delaware in 1787 for 
the amusement of the framers of the Federal Constitution. Its 
inventor, John Fitch, lamented in his memoir: “I know of nothing 
so perplexing and vexatious to a man of feelings as a turbulent 
Wife and Steamboat building. I experienced the former, and quit 
in season, and had I been in my right senses, I should undoubtedly 
have treated the latter in the same manner.” Dunbar, in his 
monumental History of Travel in America (1915), tells the whole 
story of Fitch, and gives cuts from which the evolution of the 
steamboat can be clearly seen. Fitch was two decades too soon. 
Not until 1807 did such a boat achieve success. This time it was 
Robert Fulton with his Clermont. 

The patent rights of Fulton, reinforced by monopoly charters 
from New York and Louisiana, were for sale for use in various 
regions. Under such rights, Roosevelt was the agent of the eastern 
speculators who designed to exploit Ohio and Mississippi River 
trade. In the summer of 1809 Roosevelt made the trip from Pitts- 
burgh to New Orleans in a comfortable flatboat, with wife and 
servants. He bore letters of introduction to be used at all the 
more important river towns and appears to have been received as 
a sort of amiable lunatic; whose design, magnificent and useful, 
was impossible of fulfillment. Practical men who knew the river 
current, knew no boat could hope to ascend against it. But Roose- 
velt stuck to his project, and gave guarantee of sincerity by mak- 
ing contracts for cutting and stacking along the banks the cord- 
wood that his boat would need when it was built. He returned to 
New York by sea, was back at Pittsburgh in 1810, and in the fol- 
lowing year had his steamboat ready in a Pittsburgh yard. 

The Roosevelt steamboat was about one hundred and sixteen 
feet long, with a beam of twenty feet. Its carrying capacity was 
rated at one hundred tons, and it cost about thirty thousand 
dollars. It was propelled by a stern paddle wheel, but it carried 
masts, and counted on using the wind whenever possible. For 


156 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


many years steam was only an auxiliary propellant. The New 
Orleans challenged the doubters as it descended the rivers in the 
fall of 1811, and demonstrated to the satisfaction of the most 
captious that it could be driven upstream. Once in the lower 
Mississippi, it became a Natchez packet, until in 1814 it was 
destroyed. 

An era of river traffic was brought to an end by the advent of 
the steamboat. It was, however, many years before the new craft 
were either numerous or safe, and there were survivals of the old 
that lingered through the century. The convenient cheapness of 
the raft or scow for one-way navigation made it impossible ever to 
displace these entirely; and Mark Twain eventually portrayed 
their spirit and displayed their limitations in Life on the Missvs- 
supp and Huckleberry Finn. 

The old period that ended in the generation from 1811 to 1837 
was dominated by the flow of current to New Orleans. Before the 
white man came, the Indians used the rivers, with their bark 
canoes, and sometimes built these large enough to carry numerous 
warriors for long distances. There was always visiting and fighting 
up and down the route from Toledo Bay to the lower Mississippi 
and the Mobile district. Occasionally the Indians found a con- 
venient log, and hollowed it out, and roughly shaped its ends, so 
as to make a sort of war galley. But with few tools, it was im- 
possible for the art of boat building to advance far before the 
European explorer and missionary arrived. Down to the time of 
the military campaigns on the Ohio, 1790-1794, there was little 
more river traffic than the canoe could carry; and almost none 
that went upstream. The erection of military posts, and the man- 
agement of armies forced the development of a built-up boat that 
could be propelled against the current. The keel boat, forty or | 
fifty feet long, and ten or twelve in width met this need. Polemen 
or oarsmen provided the motive power, but their needs for space 
and food took so much of the cargo room, that trade by keel boats 
was never large.’ 

When the settlers came, the bosom of the river was dotted with 
miscellaneous craft constructed out of rough planks, with designs 
and names that varied with their builders’ whims. The records of 
the day are filled with mention of bateaux, barges, arks, scows, 
and flatboats. The pirogue was generally a boat hollowed, Indian 


3 Thwaites was not content to limit his studies to the library, and made an historical 
canoe trip along the Ohio shore, that is described in On the Storied Ohio (1903). 


THE BONDS OF UNITY 157 


fashion, out of a single log; but the other boats grade off from 
what were only rafts surrounded by the gunwale, to long, slender, 
keel boats that responded to a rudder, and could be used for fairly 
rapid travel. The emigrant family, when it struck navigable 
water, built some sort of flatboat, nearly square, and without 
shaped contours. Part of the boat was likely to be roofed over, for 
shelter. There were sweeps at stern and sides, not for propulsion 
but for steering purposes. In such an ark, or scow, or flat, the 
family drifted to its destination; and there knocked the boat apart, 
to use the planks in building a house. 

The exporting farmer, who had the accumulation of a prosper- 
ous season to dispose of, built such a craft, and took it down river 
in the late winter. For the farmer boy, a trip to New Orleans with 
a cargo of flour, meal, and whiskey meant a chance to see the 
world; and the homeward trip up the Natchez trace had all the 
thrills of exploration in the wilderness. At New Orleans the rough 
-backwoodsman saw a civilization surrounded with articles of 
European manufacture. There was not much that he could take 
back home except the mental picture of luxuries and conveniences. 
He was likely to resume his normal life a convert to local manu- 
factures, to road improvement, and to a national policy that 
would encourage these. The volume of river traffic, under these 
conditions, was so large as to affect the mental attitude of most of 
the West. An observer at Louisville, in the winter before Roose- 
velt took his steamboat down, counted one hundred and ninety- 
seven flats and fourteen keel boats that passed the Falls of the 
Ohio in two months. A traveler upsteam from Natchez to Louis- 
ville in 1816, met two thousand flats in a voyage of twenty-five 
days. When the traveler tied up at night at a convenient bluff, 
where he could get firewood and fresh water, he was likely to find 
numerous associates on similar errand clustered around him. 
Bradbury found thirteen arks moored at New Madrid, one day 
in 1811. ? 

The traffic was nearly all one way. There were indeed importers 
who brought keel boat cargoes of store goods from New Orleans to 
the Louisville and Cincinnati markets, and it was reported that in 
1800 this freight was cheaper than the wagon freights from Phila- 
delphia, and could be procured for five or six dollars a ton. The 
competition between the Atlantic ports and New Orleans was 
indecisive for half a century after the building of the Cumberland 
Road and the advent of the steamboat. Not until the Civil War, 


158 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


and the closure of the Mississippi was the final answer given, 
whether the West was to be tributary to the East or to the South. 
In the end, the artificial routes across the mountains won the 
victory, and bound the interior of the continent in closest eco- 
nomic ties to the East. But the West extracted its price for this 
connection, by retaining complete freedom of political action for 
itself; and by throwing its vote first East and then South, it hag 
been able to determine the political complexion of the nation. 

The steamboat era begins about 1811, and advances slowly for a 
generation. The hopes of the first builders that the boats could 
be used effectively upstream were not realized at once. Not until 
1817 did the first steamer from New Orleans, the Etna, reach 
Louisville. The Western Engineer that carried Long’s exploring 
party in 1819, was one of the earliest of boats to try to ascend the 
Missouri; but by 1832 one of the fur companies sent its supply 
steamer up that river to the mouth of the Yellowstone River, 
where Fort Union was erected. The Mississippi was ascended to 
the site of St. Paul in 1823. Before the panic of 1837 there were 
nearly three hundred steamboats at work on the interior rivers; 
and ten years later there were nearly twelve hundred. From the 
panic of 1837 to the outbreak of the Civil War, the steamboat 
traffic was at its height. The older conveyances continued to be 
used for limited objectives; but the West that bordered on the 
Ohio and Mississippi had long since passed out of its condition of 
primitive frontier. 


CHAPTER XVIII 
THE WABASH FRONTIER: TECUMSEH, 1811 


For fifteen years after Wayne’s battle at Fallen Timbers the 
western frontier of the United States was generally at peace 
with its Indian neighbors. There was no protracted war on 
either northern or southern border, and in the middle region 
where the Ohio and Tennessee provide natural highways, the 
frontier farmers thrust a great wedge of settlement to the west, 
with its apex near the western end of Kentucky. The census of 
1810, third under the Constitution, recorded more than seven 
and a quarter million inhabitants in the United States. Of 
these more than one in four lived in such communities as Ken- 
-tucky and Tennessee, or in similar conditions in the older States. 
The log-cabin population of the absolute margin was a small 
fraction of the whole; but even the three fourths of the people 
in the older communities had not grown out of the recollection 
of primitive conditions. It was on the absolute margin that the 
contacts were made with the Indian tribes, and that the failure 
of the Federal Government to evolve an Indian policy became 
most clearly apparent. 

The basic conditions of their life made it impossible for Indians 
and whites to live near neighbors. What had been true from the 
first colonial settlements until the Revolution remained quite as 
true, and more important, when the migrations to the West in- 
creased in volume after the Revolution. The heavier the white 
demand for land, the more clear was it that a race living by the 
chase could not withstand it. The Indian population was sparse; 
the thin white margin was based upon an immovable and aggres- 
sive civilization. If for no other reason than that the white 
farmers killed off and drove away the game, their appearance 
spelled disaster for Indian hopes. 

But the other reasons were as compelling. The lust for land 
titles brought into the Indians’ range of vision a new element 
which they could not understand. The more honorable and 
steady the farmer, the more determined he was to possess the 
attractive sites and exclude forever the trespasser. The tribal 
right of use, which was all the Indian had, was never clear or 


160 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


exclusive. And every misstep made by single brave, or tribe, 
was followed inevitably by demands for compensation in the 
form of cessions of land; and these by enforced migrations that 
kept the Indians in a life of endless change. Even if they had 
shown aptness in taking up the better customs of the whites, the 
shiftlessness that follows lack of private property and continual 
change of residence would have kept them demoralized. 

The best virtues of the whites led to Indian undoing, by de- 
stroying their livelihood and occupying their land. The vices of 
the whites were as outstanding as their virtues, and even more 
disastrous. In whiskey the frontier farmer or trader had a cheap 
commodity for which the savage would pay a high price. The 
furs that had taken months to collect would be traded for a song 
—in whiskey. And after the Indian was drunk he would barter 
anything, or make his mark on any paper or treaty, and thus 
from the white standpoint dispossess himself of everything else 
he had. | Whiskey was the most important of the evil influences 
that led to demoralization. The lust of white men, easily gratified 
by access to the Indian women, broke down whatever tendency 
to personal morality the Indians possessed, and sexual diseases 
spread quickly and inevitably through the tribes within a few 
years after each one was brought into contact with the border. 

The first travelers invariably pictured an Indian civilization 
with an attractive dignity associated with it. After a few years 
squalor, degradation and disease destroyed most of this. There 
was never any law, or deliberate policy that the Indians must 
sell their lands, but it happened year after year, as the two civili- 
zations touched, that for one reason or another it was possible 
to induce the tribes concerned to surrender their lands and move 
away. There was ever a public and sincere profession that the 
Indian had a right to live his life, and that he must not be de- 
stroyed, yet the habits of the races made residence together 
impossible, and the type of government that the American people 
desired tolerated no agencies powerful enough to administer a 
problem of such difficulty. 

The Indian relations in the Northwest after the battle of 
Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville were generally 
quiet. The British garrisons surrendered the American posts 
along the Lakes and withdrew to Canada. Detroit ceased to be 
their center for the control of the fur trade, and in its place 
Fort Malden was developed. Amherstburg, at the extreme 


THE WABASH FRONTIER: TECUMSEH, 1811 161 


western tip of Ontario, now marks the site of Malden. The spot 
was nearly as accessible as Detroit, and the Indians crowded its 
environs during the trading season. From Malden to Pensacola 
there was a frequented trail beaten by the tribes as they came 
and went from the Spanish posts on the Gulf to the British on the 
Lakes. The density of Indian population along this route was 
greater than elsewhere in eastern America. The villages that 
they regarded as home were here, and their tribal burying grounds. 
Wild game was still their chief means of subsistence, but around 
many of these villages the braves had advanced enough in civiliza- 
tion to compel the squaws to clear and work an occasional corn- 
field or potato patch. As the frontier of settlement approached 
this line after 1810, the question rose to ominous prominence 
whether history would again repeat itself, and the tribes recede; 
or whether they might not make a stand here and resist eviction. 
Governor William Henry Harrison presided at Vincennes on 
the Wabash for many years after the foundation of Indiana 
Territory in 1800.1 Here he saw the procession of Indians pass 
up and down the river, carrying furs to trade at Malden, and 
guns and scalping knives as they returned. The scalping knife 
has a malevolent meaning in western literature. It was, however, 
a necessary part of a hunter’s outfit, for it was only a skinning 
knife, and was necessary every time game was killed. Even the 
most bloodthirsty brave used it only occasionally to remove the 
hair from his enemy’s head; but the war-time purpose gave it 
its repute. The Indiana settler, watching the procession, and 
observing the intimacy between the Indians and the British 
traders, found it hard to avoid the suspicion that every anti- 
American movement of the tribes was inspired at Malden, and 
that England was the inveterate enemy of the United States. 
Governor Harrison witnessed this, and saw as well the fact 
that unless he should take the lead his territory could not grow. 
There was almost no land in Indiana in 1800 to which the Indian 
title had been quieted. At the eastern margin was a long wedge- 
shaped tract, known later as the gore. Its apex was at Fort 
Recovery; it widened towards the south until along the Ohio it 
extended from the mouth of the Great Miami to that of the 


1 Homer J. Webster, ‘‘ William Henry Harrison’s Administration of Indiana Territory,” 
is in the Indiana Historical Society Publications, vol. 1v; more recently there have appeared 
in Indiana Historical Collections the opening volumes of Governors Messages and Letters, of 
which the first two are Logan Esarey, Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison 
(1922-1923). Esarey’s work contains the best guide to Indiana history. 


162 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Kentucky River. In 1800 it was left in the Eastern Division, 
but when Ohio was enabled it was transferred to Indiana. Settlers 
could buy land here. They could buy it also at the Clark Grant, 
opposite Louisville; or perhaps from some of the French residents 
along the Wabash, whose rights to the soil they occupied were 
safeguarded in the various treaties of cession. There were also 
a few military reserves belonging to the United States, and 
specified in the Treaty of Greenville. But on the whole, Indiana 
was for the Indians and of them, when Harrison took hold.? 

Steadily after 1800, Harrison pressed upon the Indians for 
further land sales, covering tracts west of the Greenville line. 
The miscellaneous tribes of the Wabash Valley used the land 
much in common. Delaware, Piankishaw, Wea, Miami, Eel 
River, Potawatami, and Kickapoo, they had all experienced 
white pressure before, and had sunk in their scale of civilization 
after a generation or more of white contact. In 1804 and 1805 
Harrison procured a cession of a tract of their land along the 
right bank of the Ohio, about thirty miles in width, and this little 
epened the demand for more. In 1809 the governor held a con- 
ference with the tribes at Fort Wayne at which the United States 
bought three million acres, extended its holdings in southern 
Indiana, and broadened the “gore” by the addition of a twelve- 
mile strip on its western side. This final treaty brought the area 
of settlement within striking distance of the Indian country 
along the Wabash, and raised the practical issue of what the 
Indians would do next. Indiana meanwhile had been reduced 
in dimension by two partitions. The Detroit region was cut 
away in 1805, by a line drawn east from the southern tip of Lake 
Michigan, and organized as Michigan Territory. Illinois Terri- 
tory was created in 1809, the dividing line ascending the Wabash 
River to a point north of Vincennes, and then due north along 
the meridian of Vincennes. Both of these lines were defined 
originally in the Ordinance of 1787. The one that established 
a northern boundary for Indiana was only temporary. 

The treaties of Fort Wayne were denounced by the Indians 
who had not signed them; and in the attack appears a note that 

* James A. Woodburn, in the centennial year of Indiana’s admission, 1916, reprinted one 
of the finest classics of frontier description, The New Purchase, or, Seven and a Half Years in 
the Far West, originally produced in 1843 by Baynard Rush Hall, under the pseudonym of 
Robert Carlton, Esq. The New Purchase was in central Indiana, the time was in the decade 


after Tippecanoe. There is no better historical narrative of the Wabash country than 
Elbert J. Benton, The Wabash ‘rade Route in the Development of the Old Northwest (1903). 


THE WABASH FRONTIER: TECUMSEH, 1811 = 163 


only occasionally was heard. The political capacity of the tribes 
and their leaders was generally weak, and what may be called 
statesmanship rarely shows itself above the level of their savage 
culture. The discontent of 1809 took the form of protecting the 
towns along the Wabash from further encroachment, and of 
repudiating the treaties by which cessions were made at Fort 
Wayne. Two brothers of the Shawnee tribe, Tecumseh and the 
Prophet, assumed the leadership of their race in opposing ag- 
gression and extinction. 

The limitations of tribal authority were apparent when it came 
to land cessions. There was no government among the Indians 
such as white men maintained and tolerated. The chiefs were not 
real rulers; they pretended to rule, and sometimes were able to 
secure obedience, but their power was based upon an actual 
assent that often was withheld. Their signatures did not bind 
the tribe in a way that the tribe accepted. Non-signers con- 
sidered themselves unbound, and individual warriors were always 
raising personal revolts. Tecumseh and the Prophet were not 
chiefs, but were agitators whose authority outran the chiefs. 
They were sons of a mixed marriage between a Creek woman and 
a Shawnee warrior, and had grown to manhood since the settle- 
ment of the Ohio country began. The military statesmanship of 
Tecumseh was supported by the mystical claims of the Prophet, 
who alleged that he had been dead and brought again to life. 
The vision of Tecumseh was founded upon the certain destruction 
of his people in case white encroachment should not cease. 

Tecumseh repudiated the treaties of Fort Wayne on the 
ground that all the land belonged to all the Indians, and that 
not even the whole membership of a single tribe could alienate 
the property of the race. There was no foundation for this claim 
in law or history, but since the United States conceded that 
Indian tribes owned the soil it could not deny them the right 
to own it as they pleased. The theory was advanced in order to 
make it impossible for any tribe, or group of braves, to yield to 
white solicitation at the end of the orgies that preceded treaty 
making, and dispossess themselves. If the theory of Tecumseh 
should succeed, it would mean a permanent barrier of Indian 
residents across the northwest corner of Indiana, and would 
exclude the United States from further expansion. For two years 
Harrison and Tecumseh were rival statesmen, with antagonistic 
purposes, who avoided overt acts and watched each other for an 


164 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


opening. Tecumseh spent the months visiting the Wabash - 
tribes, picturing the desolate future if they should have to go, 
and building up among them the will to resist as well as to follow 
his leadership. Harrison, meanwhile, watched for an outbreak 
that would justify retaliation, assuaged the irritation of the 
Indiana people at the effrontery of Tecumseh, and realized in 
full the crisis that Tecumseh threatened. 

The political teaching of Tecumseh began before the treaty of 
1809. In 18018 he located himself in a new village on the Wabash, 
below the mouth of Tippecanoe Creek and above the present 
site of Lafayette. As Prophet’s Town this village grew to be 
the center of disaffection. He restrained his followers from 
attacks and murder, aware that he could not withstand an 
American army. He preached peaceful and passive resistance, 
that would attain its end and yet disarm the military branch 
of the American Government. Between Prophet’s ‘Town and 
Malden there was continuous intercourse that Harrison inter- 
preted as positive English intrigue against American peace. The 
speeches of English traders and agents at Malden were incautious 
and often inflammatory. The gifts they made to American 
braves were at least indiscreet. The Indians acquired the belief 
that England would back them up in obstructing the advance of 
the American frontier. 

The population of Indiana was so scanty in 1810 that the 
Indian hope to restrain it was not entirely visionary. The census 
recorded twenty-four thousand in Indiana, twelve thousand in 
[linois, and forty-seven hundred in Michigan. There was no 
pressure of white farmers due to actual restriction of available 
lands. It was rather the generous idea of the frontier that wanted 
to be free in every direction, and the hope of speculators to 
operate over broad areas. The antagonistic racial ideas were 
dominant, and the national hopes of both Indians and whites 
were bound up with the future of the soil. Harrison, like St. Clair 
before him, had great difficulty in keeping the settlers within the 
ceded areas where there were lands for sale. They persisted in 
pushing into unceded regions, and in squatting where they had 
no right to be. When Indians protested against the theft of 
their land, the agitated squatter interpreted it as hostility; and 
when protests were followed by violence or murder, the border 
charged the Indians with war. 

Harrison and Tecumseh were in correspondence for the two 


THE WABASH FRONTIER: TECUMSEH, 1811 165 


years after the treaty of Fort Wayne. Occasionally the red states- 
man paid a visit of state to Vincennes, and more than once 
Harrison fancied that open war was going to be thrust upon him. 
He called upon the War Department for men and munitions, 
and encouraged Ohio and Kentucky to be ready to assist him in 
an emergency. Until the summer of 1811 actual war was avoided, 
and the break was postponed so long as Tecumseh remained on 
the Wabash to hold his followers in check. 

In the spring of 1811, Tecumseh made a trip to visit the 
southern Indians, and preach to them his doctrine of a general 
strike against white demands. His absence revealed the shifting 
sands upon which the aspiring Indian statesman had to rear his 
structure. The braves, whom only he could hold back from hos- 
tility, were too much for the Prophet who tried to control them 
in his absence. Reports of violence straggled in to Vincennes 
in the summer, and throughout the border spread the conviction 
that the Indians were at war. Harrison’s conduct encourages 
the belief that he was hoping for a cause for military demonstra- 
tion against the Indians. He thought himself a military strate- 
gist, and from his youth had studied the careers of ‘military 
heroes. He was not without hope to shine as Wayne shone in 
the history of the Northwest, and to perpetuate his fame by 
military glory. He was determined to find a means of breaking 
down the resistance that Tecumseh’s dangerous idea had built 
up against the further acquisition of Indian lands. 

Around Fort Knox, which was the military post at Vincennes, 
Harrison collected a force in the summer of 1811. He accumu- 
lated about nine hundred men, mostly regular troops and Ken- 
tucky volunteers. ‘Towards the end of September he began a 
march up the Wabash, as a military demonstration, for the 
intimidation of the Shawnee and their allies. In October he 
paused at the site of Terre Haute to build Fort Harrison. Pro- 
ceeding northward, and receiving frequent indications of the 
Indian determination to hold their own, he came to Prophet’s 
Town early in November, and marched beyond it to the mouth 
of Tippecanoe Creek. For several days he had been marching 
through the unceded area, which might have been regarded as 
an act of war; and each day as he advanced the number of Indians _ . 
seen upon his flanks and rear increased. They were sullen and 
defiant, but did not fight. The officers of the American army 
wanted Harrison to destroy the Indian village without waiting 


166 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


for an attack; but the commander’s caution made him wait, 
yet did not restrain him from taking, on the night of November 6, 
a camping site to which his Indian scouts had led him. He was 
one hundred and fifty miles away from his base at Fort Knox, 
in hostile territory, with insufficient supplies, and with troops 
that were restive under attempts at discipline. 

The American camp was on a hog’s-back south of the Tippe- 
canoe Creek, as it enters into the Wabash. The American army 
did not entrench, for it lacked trenching tools. The men slept 
on their arms, through a rainy night. Sentries were placed, and 
one of these gave the warning about four o’clock on the morning 
of November 7, that the Indians were rushing the camp. From 
the moment of the onset until daybreak the outcome of the 
engagement was uncertain, but with daylight the American 
marksmen were able to drive the Indians back, and hold their 
ground. Through the next ten days Harrison worked his force 
back to Vincennes, and the further they marched the more they 
convinced themselves that they had won a great victory. As 
time passed on, the events of Tippecanoe ran the gauntlet of 
hostile controversy; but Harrison’s supporters in the Northwest 
never wavered in their belief in his military genius.* He was the 
first personality of political consequence to emerge from the 
Northwest Territory, and throughout the remaining thirty years 
of his life the Hero of Tippecanoe was a personification of the 
frontier spirit. Had he not been as well the eager representative 
of the frontier desire to quiet Indian land titles, his vogue would 
never have been enough to make him President. 

The Battle of Tippecanoe, doubtful victory as it was, did for 
the Wabash country what Fallen Timbers did for the Maumee. 
It broke the rising tide of Indian consciousness. Tecumseh never 
recovered his leadership; and after the War of 1812 was over, 
the United States extended its area of public lands to Lake 
Michigan without resistance. The generation that fought Harrison 
sent many braves across the Lakes to fight with England in the ap- 
proaching war, but after 1815 they gave no further cause for Amer- 
ican anxiety. For twenty years the tribes raised no problem that 
led to war. When their children came to manhood they listened 
to Black Hawk, and allowed themselves to be maneuvered into 
an appearance of war in 1832, but they never again interposed 
effective resistance to the advance of the Northwest border. 

? Alfred Pirtle, The Batile of Tippecanoe (1900), in Filson Club Publications, 


CHAPTER XIX 
THE WESTERN WAR OF 1812 


THREE days before William Henry Harrison escaped from de- 
struction, and laid the foundation of his standing as a military 
hero, the Twelfth Congress assembled at Washington, chose 
Henry Clay of Kentucky as Speaker and organized its com- 
mittees for immediate entry into war. The members of the new 
Congress, elected during 1810 and 1811, were chosen while 
American feeling against England was everywhere high. In the 
frontier States it carried all before it. The belief that England 
was behind Tecumseh and that his demonstration was in itself 
an act of war, was easily accepted in the West. The indignities 
that the United States had suffered at British hands on and off 
for eighteen years, aroused western resentment and stimulated 
another side of the western character from that which Aaron 
Burr had roused in 1806. 

The frontier American has been capable of violent contrasts 
and has vibrated between individualism and localism at one 
extreme, and national idealism at the other. Foreign observers 
have been bewildered by quick American changes, and few 
Americans have been certain which, if either, tendency has re- 
presented the real American character. From 1783 until the 
collapse of the conspiracy of Burr, the forces that were in the 
lead throughout the West were indigenous, and grew out of the 
isolation of life and the importance of the individual. A low 
regard for Federal authority appeared. Angry legislatures scolded 
at acts of Congress and avowed belief in constitutional doctrines 
that could not have worked anywhere outside a state of anarchy. 
Leading citizens saw no wrong in intriguing with foreign nations. 
The danger of actual separation was present, and inspired Jef- 
ferson’s prompt purchase of Louisiana when the closure of the 
Mississippi was threatened. The tendencies towards disunion 
were gradually lessened as the century advanced, but the West 
did not cease to look upon the affairs of the world from the view- 
point of the parish. 

Directly opposite were the tendencies that induced a high 
regard for the ideal of a Nation as contrasted with the State. 


168 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Each of the thirteen original States had behind it a long history 
as colony, and a short period of real independence. Professor 
Van Tyne has shown beyond doubt how the States regarded 
themselves as sovereign during the Revolution, the most striking 
evidence being the fact that it was their several adoptions of 
independence rather than the declaration by Congress that gave 
weight to this momentous fact. Their actual independence, 
and their willingness to develop local aims at the expense of 
the National, caused Washington to age, and made his pro- 
blem a general one of supreme politics and common sense, as well 
as one of military strategy. But this independence was confined 
to the original thirteen, or perhaps fourteen, if Vermont be in- 
cluded with them. No other State, except Texas, has had such 
experience. Instead, each new State as admitted to the Union 
has looked back to a period of growth under tutelage. One or 
two have broken off full-grown from a parent State, but most 
have begun as Indian country, occupied without controversy by 
Indian tribes. The quieting of Indian title, a necessary precedent 
to white occupation, has been a national duty. The settler has 
taken his deed directly from the Nation. 

The Nation has stood behind and over the early stages of 
statehood development. By act of Congress the first government 
has been set up; by similar act a legislature has been allowed. 
In most cases an enabling act has been preliminary to the forma- 
tion of a State constitution, and admission to the United States 
has been a privilege for which some States have waited long. 
The postal service has loomed big in western imagination, and 
has been a Federal function. In later years the Federal grant of 
land for schools and public institutions, and for railroad construc- 
tion, has encouraged the local community to turn to Washington 
for aid. The Nation has ever been above the western State, and 
the free flowing imagination of the westerner has turned itself 
loose upon the Nation as an ideal. In personifying the United 
States, it was natural that the western traits should be those 
expected of the Nation. The sensitiveness of the westerner for 
personal honor and dignity was magnified as national honor. 
And in the two decades before the war Congress met in 1811, the 
United States had plenty of provocation to arouse the western 
sense of indignation and national resentment. 

The grievances that justified the War of 1812 were mixed in 
character and long in accumulating. From the opening of the 


THE WESTERN WAR OF 1812 169 


European wars in 1793, England and France were in a struggle 
for survival. They fought on land and sea; and neutrals, met 
with on either element, suffered indignity and inconvenience. 
There was no real neutrality until Washington proclaimed it, 
and it was easier to proclaim than to make it respected. The 
Jay Treaty of 1794 gave respite that averted war with England 
at that time. The short naval war with France at the end of the 
century was terminated by a promise from Napoleon to show 
proper courtesy to the young republic. But when the wars were 
resumed, England and France tried to hurt each other by a 
policy of strangulation and trade curtailment. And the neutral 
carriers, who had taken over much of the commerce of the world, 
suffered. The British Orders in Council and the French retali- 
atory decrees were not inspired by special hostility to the United 
States. They indicated rather a determination on the part of 
both combatants not to risk injury by pausing to regard neutral 


~ eonvenience. 


American grievances accumulated against both belligerents. 
Against England was the restraint of the colonial carrying trade, 
the maintenance of a virtual blockade of American ports, and 
the repeated seizure of seamen from American vessels on the 
allegation that they were of British origin. The United States 
admitted the right to search for contraband, to enforce actual 
blockades, and to determine the nationality and destination of 
the merchant ship. It denied a right to use the search for any 
other purpose, and regarded as insulting and degrading the 
British claim to enforce upon American ships the British doctrine 
of permanent allegiance. Against France the grievances were 
fewer in fact, and greater in outrage. Since French war vessels 
were unsafe at sea, there were few of them to search or injure 
American ships so long as these kept away from French ports. 
But in port in France, or wherever he could reach them, Napo- 
leon caused the seizure and confiscation of American ships at 
will. France made no contention that her acts were lawful, as 
England did. She acted frankly in retaliation, and vented a weak 
maritime spite upon neutrals guileless enough to trust her. 
Great numbers of American vessels by putting themselves under 
British license, found the war trade profitable, and the States of 
New England that owned the ships were slow to resentment 
against the British acts. But elsewhere the searches and seizures 
roused the American spirit. Along the border they ranked with 


170 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the supposed British intrigue among the Indians in preparing 
the American mind for war. 

The escapades of Burr came at the moment when the West 
was ready to throw off the spirit of localism and to take on for 
a time the idea of a Nation. The attack of the British frigate 
Leopard upon the American Chesapeake, was perhaps the pivotal 
episode. This occurred in June, 1807, and the United States 
was wrung with impotent rage at the picture of the helpless 
seamen on the American warship as they stood up under the 
broadside fire of the British bully. The officer who fired a single 
gun in defense with a live coal carried in his fingers became a 
hero; but the fact remained that an American frigate had allowed 
its men to be taken from its deck without resistance. Jefferson re- 
ported that no event since the Declaration of Independence had 
so greatly aroused the people; but neither he nor they took it to 
heart as an evidence of inefficient administration and lack of 
power to enforce respect. The western desire for revenge grew 
steadily from this date, and Jefferson spent the rest of his days 
in office in the futile effort to procure respect by pacific means. 
Madison inherited his problem in 1809, without Jefferson’s in- 
genuity in dodging the issue. Embargoes and non-intercourse of 
different types were tried. New England was making money, and 
was in favor of putting up with the affronts; the Middle States 
were divided; but the West and South were insistent for im- 
mediate war. 

The young Democratic leaders of 1811 were required to win 
over President Madison to their program. Madison had a realiza- 
tion of both the extent of the grievance and the inadequacy of 
American means for war. His message to Congress in 1811 com- 
plained of unprovoked injustice on the part of both England and 
France, and invited Congress to put “the United States into an 
armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis.” In March, 
1812, he sent a special message, with papers showing a British 
intrigue in New England, and on June 1 he asked Congress to 
recognize the fact that England had created a state of war 
against the United States. It was alleged by northern critics 
of the President that he did this only under the threat that other- 
wise another man would be nominated for the presidency in 1812; 
but there is no evidence to prove the charge. He at least knew 
how little the country was ready, and codperated in the passage 
of laws to increase the regular army, to utilize the militia, to 


THE WESTERN WAR OF 1812 171 


assemble a body of volunteers, and to improve the organization 
and services among the land forces. 

Madison had few trained officers or men to draw upon, and a 
War Department in which the Secretary was assisted by only a 
handful of clerks. The appointments of men to hold commissions 
went naturally to those who sympathized with the war, and 
Federalists complained of favoritism and sectionalism in making 
them. Winfield Scott, who had himself entered the service in 
the wave of enthusiasm following the Chesapeake affair, described 
his fellow officers as inefficient, lazy, uncouth, and often drunken.! 
For the high commands, in the absence of available men in the 
regular service, Madison dug out officers of experience in the 
Revolution, who had lived a quiet civil life for nearly thirty 
years. Governor William Hull, of Michigan Territory, became 
thus a brigadier general against his better judgment, and was 
sent to Ohio to create an army for operation in Ontario. Major- 
~ General Henry Dearborn, with qualifications similar to those of 
Hull, was sent to command in New York and New England, and 
cover the approaches at Niagara and Lake Champlain. Before 
the war was actually declared on June 18, 1812, movements had 
been made on paper for the capture of Canada and the defense 
of the southwest border. 

The western demand for immediate war was associated with 
a belief that Canada could be easily overrun and added to the 
Union and an unwillingness to burden the people with taxes for 
paying the costs of the enterprise. There was no fear of im- 
mediate invasion along the seacoast, or from New Orleans. In 
the Northwest, where the rival fur traders had long contested 
for the business of the Indians, there was both a danger of border 
attacks and a chance for gains. The United States had already 
a show of force along the Upper Lakes. There were as many as 
one hundred and twenty men at Detroit, eighty-five at Fort 
Wayne, eighty-eight at Michilimackinace, fifty-three at Fort Dear- 
born, and similar numbers at half a dozen other posts. Along 
the Wabash and Maumee was a natural line of defense, which 
lay, indeed, one hundred miles or more beyond the outposts of 
the agricultural population, but which did not include any im- 
possible salient in case there should be a British aggressive. The 
likeliness of this was disregarded, and Hull was expected to enter 
Canada at once. 

4 Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-Gen. Scott, LL.D., written by Himself (1864). 


172 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Congress declared war while Hull’s army was en route from 
Dayton, Ohio, to the Maumee River, making its way through a 
roadless and unsettled country. Arriving at Toledo Bay, and 
knowing nothing of the state of war, Hull took the chance of 
sending his baggage to Detroit by boat, in order to lighten his 
men and hurry up their march. The official runner bearing news 
of the declaration came too late; a companion, sent by business 
interests to protect their northwest trade, reached the British at 
Malden in time for them to pick up the sloop carrying Hull’s 
baggage and papers as it passed their post. 

This was the first calamity for the old, inexpert, and reluctant 
commander in the West. He reached Detroit and pushed on 
into Canada. He thought that Dearborn and the War Depart- 
ment were in codperation, with counter measures at other parts 
of the Canadian frontier, to keep the English busy everywhere. 
But he had no knowledge of it, nor did the Department, nor even 
Dearborn. 

The strength of Hull’s army in Canada is variously reported 
to have been between one thousand and fifteen hundred effective 
men, while the British had against him nearly one thousand. 
They were concentrated at Malden, which place Hull approached 
in July. He convinced himself that he could not take it, as prob- 
ably he could not, and retired in August across the river to 
Detroit. The arrival of Tecumseh with Indian allies for the 
British was the last item that went into his decision to withdraw. 

Hull knew the difficulty of holding a salient at Detroit against 
British attack, but his men were unwilling to fall back to the 
Maumee, and he could not bring himself to lead them into 
action.? The British officer, General Isaac Brook, took advantage 
of every weakness, and knew as well that there was nothing to 
fear from Dearborn at Niagara. He crossed the Detroit River 
after Hull, and on August 16, 1812, received the surrender of the 
whole American force. By the same date the British and Indians 
had occupied all of the outlying American posts beyond the 
Wabash, murdering the garrison at Fort Dearborn the day before 
Hull’s surrender.? The military frontier was now at the line 

2M. Campbell, Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull; prepared 
from his Manuscripts by his Daughter. Together with the History of the Campaign of 1812, and 
Surrender of the Post of Detroit, by his Grandson, James Freeman Clarke (1848); Ernest 
Cruikshank, “‘General Hull’s Invasion of Canada in 1812,’’ in Royal Society of Canada 


Publications and Transactions, 1'707. 
* There is no first-rate general history of the War of 1812, although Adams and McMaster 


THE WESTERN WAR OF 1812 173 


where sound strategy would have first established it, but only 
after humiliation and loss that ended Hull’s honor and career. 

The burden of frontier defense fell next upon the waiting 
shoulders of Governor Harrison, who received a commission as 
major general in the Kentucky militia in order to give him rank. 
It was politics as well as generalship that kept the Kentucky 
militia fighting on the Ohio line; but for the next year there was 
real doubt whether the line would hold. Winchester was beaten 
at the River Raisin in January, 1813, and the West gave up its 
hope of conquering Canada. 

The construction of a small American flotilla on Lake Erie, 
and Perry’s victory with it at Put-in-Bay in September, 1813, 
changed the military balance in Upper Canada, but did not give 
negotiable advantage to the United States. Harrison followed 
it by a second invasion of Canada, by way of Malden and broke 
the British forces at the Battle of the Thames on October 5; 
but at Niagara, and the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and on 
Lake Champlain, the military plans of Madison and his advisers 
miscarried, so that the final victories of Perry and Harrison did 
no more than bring safety to the Ohio and Indiana frontiers. 
The armies there were broken up in the autumn of 1813, and for 
them the war was over. The Indian hopes that Tecumseh had 
played upon were destroyed, and that brave himself lay dead on 
the battlefield of the Thames. Harrison who had meanwhile been 
made a major general in the regular army, found so little left for 
him to do that he resigned his commission in May, 1814, just in 
time for the Secretary of War to bestow it upon a new military 
hero of the southwest border, Andrew Jackson. 

From the standpoint of the frontier, the Indian war of 1811, 
and the events of the War of 1812, were the means by which 
it became possible to push the area of American occupation from 
the line of the Wabash, to that of the Illinois River and Chicago. 
In similar fashion the events of the war made it possible to open 
the land southwest of the Tennessee and the Chattahoochee, and 
to establish direct connections between the farming frontier of 
Georgia and that of Louisiana. For two main reasons the Mis- 
sissippi Territory that filled this gap after the Georgia cession of 


have given it careful treatment incidental to their larger themes. Milo M. Quaife, Chicago 
and the Oia Northwest (1913), is both interesting and learned. F. E. Stevens, “Illinvis and 
the War of 1812-1814,’’ in Illinois State Historical Library Publications, vol. rx, contains 
an abundance of local data. The various local historical societies have many papers upon 
special aspects of the frontier defense. 


174 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


1802, was slow in its development. One was the normal direction 
of the roads running westward from Carolina and Georgia, which 
lay in general north of the Tennessee. The other was the resisting 
power of the Cherokee, and their neighbors, the Creek and 
Seminole, the Chickasaw and Choctaw. These tribes were in 
possession of the southwest country when the War of 1812 broke 
out. Fort Hawkins on the Ocmulgee, in Georgia, was the jump- 
ing-off place, and there the Indian agent, Benjamin Hawkins, 
dispensed justice to both races, as he had done since his appoint- 
ment by Washington in 1796. 

The opening of Mississippi lands to settlement proceeded 
slowly. There were Choctaw cessions on the lower Mississippi, 
around Natchez, and along the thirty-first parallel that sepa- 
rated Mississippi from West Florida. A few white settlers leaked 
in at the bend of the Tennessee, where they squatted without 
right, and without much friction. There were more around 
Mobile and on the streams emptying into the bay of that name. 
St. Stephens was the center of American colonization of what is now 
southern Alabama, and by 1811 a new trace, the “three-chopped 
way, was blazed from Fort Hawkins through St. Stephens, and 
thence west to Natchez. At the outset of the war Wilkinson 
took possession of the strip of West Florida added to Mississippi, 
and bounded east and west by the Perdido and Pearl rivers. 

The American collapse at Detroit in 1812 had an evil influence 
on the Indians of Mississippi, who were already uneasy with the 
teachings oi Tecumseh. Among the Creeks the younger braves 
demanded war, and the nervous whites living near the Mobile 
River built themselves a stockade close by the junction of the 
Alabama and Tombigbee, which they called Fort Mims. Here 
they were attacked by Creek Indians on August 30, 1813, and 
in the resulting massacre nearly five hundred settlers lost their 
lives. The border filled with panic at once. The governor of the 
territory called upon Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, and the 
United States for help, and Tennessee provided it. Andrew 
Jackson, who had commanded an aimless march to Natchez in 
1812, was placed in command of Tennessee militia, and in October, 
1813, crossed the Tennessee River in search of hostile Indians 
and their main villages.t| The troubles of a militia commander 


4 James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (1860), is a vivacious portrait that embodies the 
legendary traits of Jackson; it is still so interesting as to be dangerous, and must be checked 
at all points with the careful documentary treatment that prevails in John Spencer Bassett, 
Lafe of Andrew Jackson (1911). The writings of Jackson, which the General himself partly 
arranged for such use, are in process of publication under the editorship of Professor Bassett. 


THE WESTERN WAR OF 1812 175 


on the border were so inherent that few leaders ever rose above 
them. Jackson was greatest of those who did. There were no 
central supply agencies in the War Department, and each com- 
mander in the.field was obliged to procure his own food, clothing, 
arms, and shelter; and then to persuade the Treasury to pay 
for them. Among the thirty-five hundred men whom Jackson led 
to the Alabama River were twelve-months men whose term of 
enlistment expired in December, 1813. There were also three- 
months men, due to be discharged in January, 1814, and after 
that some sixty-days men whose term expired in March. With 
such a system, typical enough of frontier forces, no training or 
discipline was either possible or profitable. The general could 
not build for the future; he was limited to such objectives as 
could be reached promptly, and to such maneuvers as could be 
undertaken by untrained marksmen. 
In spite of difficulties in commissariat, pay, and personnel, 
Jackson reached the Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa River in 
March, 1814, and found the “Redsticks” or hostile Creek war- 
riors, sheltered behind breastworks in their camp. There were 
perhaps nine hundred braves who entered the fight on March 27, 
and perhaps a third that number who survived. The warrior 
band was destroyed, and the fugitives who escaped gave no 
further threat to the safety of the territory. Jackson continued 
his march down the Tallapoosa after the victory, as far as the 
Hickory Grounds below its junction with the Coosa River, which 
forms the head of the Alabama. He built Fort Jackson here, 
held it with a garrison, and sent his volunteers home for their 
discharge. He had met his problems of discipline, as his bio- 
graphers, Parton and Bassett, show in great detail, by personal 
appeal and courage. He did not hesitate to violate the law or 
cut red tape when the safety of his army was at stake. He carried 
out the decisions of courts-martial with the death penalty, yet 
managed to hold the affection of his men upon whom he imposed 
his relentless will. He was the marked man of the West for the 
rest of his life. 

The campaigns of 1814 opened Mississippi Territory as well as 
Indiana. In August, the Creeks were punished for their sins by 
a treaty which the victor dictated at Fort Jackson, in which they 
lost their lands between the Coosa River and the divide separating 
it from the Tombigbee. The braves who needed the punishment 
were dead or in flight; the quiet Creek warriors, many of whom 


176 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


had fought with Jackson, were the only ones who could be col- 
lected in the council. The injustice involved in punishing the 
good for the excesses of the bad was an ordinary part of the 
practice of handling the tribes. 

The frontier enthusiasm for an easy conquest of Canada was 
disappointed. The high spirit with which the War of 1812 was 
undertaken was followed by discouragement at its failures. The 
administrative powers of the Government at Washington were 
so weak that the war must have blundered even if Congress had 
been willing to provide the means. But the war congressmen 
would not vote these. Gallatin had presided over the Treasury 
Department since his original appointment at the beginning of 
Jefferson’s administration, and had become the leading financial 
statesman of his day. He gave up his office during the war in 
despair at the inability of his party associates to see the im- 
possibility of getting victory without taxation. Peace com- 
missioners, with Henry Clay as their western member, were sent 
abroad early in the war, in hope that England would yield some- 
thing. They found instead a British desire to impose upon the 
United States an actual loss of territory. England talked of 
Tecumseh’s warriors as allies and asked compensation for them 
in the form of an Indian state on the northwest frontier. It was 
victory for the American diplomats to avoid indemnity and par- 
tition. While they negotiated, a raiding force landed at the 
Chesapeake and burned Washington, in August, 1814, without 
meeting any effective resistance. The one thrill that might have 
contributed to some American advantage did not occur until two 
weeks after the commissioners had signed the peace of Ghent. 

After the victory at Horseshoe Bend, Jackson received the 
major generalcy vacated by Harrison, and continued on the duty 
of covering the southwestern border. There was annoyance, and 
some danger, at Pensacola in the part of West Florida that the 
United States had not yet seized. The British naval forces took 
this town, in spite of its nominal Spanish and hence neutral 
character, and used it as a base to excite Indians against the 
Georgia and Mississippi settlements. Jackson invaded West 
Florida in 1814, and burned Pensacola; but he subsequently 
handed back the country to the protesting Spanish officials. 
After this he was sent to New Orleans, for the news was abroad 
that England had dispatched thither an army of veterans from 
the Peninsula to take the city. 


THE WESTERN WAR OF 1812 177 


Sir Edward Pakenham, brother-in-law of the Duke of Welling- 
ton, was given command of the raiding force that burned Wash- 
ington, and of other troops made available by the ending of the 
war with France, and was directed to take New Orleans. His 
men landed in the autumn on the lakes below the city, and he 
joined them there at Christmas time. It is hard to believe that a 
professional force of veterans ought to have been broken by such 
an army as Jackson could assemble for the defense of New Orleans. 
Charles Francis Adams, who has given the engagement the most 
Incisive criticism,’ believes that the defeat was due to a prone- 
ness in British tactics to resort to “‘football’’ methods, and to 
the fact that Pakenham found that before his arrival his men 
had been placed in an untenable position between the Mississippi 
River and a huge marsh. Jackson, who was between the invader 
and New Orleans, and behind improvised trenches and breast- 
works of bales of cotton, outguessed him. Even thus, Adams 
concludes that Pakenham, having plenty of boats, ought to have 
thrown his force across the river, and flanked Jackson out of his 
defenses. But he did not; and on January 8, 1815, fifteen days 
after the Treaty of Ghent was signed, the British army was 
defeated, Pakenham was killed in action, and Jackson added to 
his trophies a new laurel as victor of New Orleans. 

The western War of 1812 added no conquests to the United 
States, but it revealed both a capacity for high ideals and a 
weakness in administration. It also made two heroes, to both of 
whom time and good fortune gave the office of President of the 
United States. 

’ Jn Studies Military and Diplomatic, 1775-1866 (1911). 


CHAPTER XX 
STABILIZING THE FRONTIER 


Tue military events of 1811-1815 were a failure, so far as they 
were an attempt to coerce Great Britain. None of the distinctive 
demands upon which the war was based were covered in the 
treaty at its end. England did not at any time exert her full 
strength to procure a victory, and the pressure of her merchants 
who preferred a good customer to a defeated enemy induced the 
British Government to sign a peace before it saw the effect of 
its expeditionary force under Lord Pakenham. The war was 
stopped, and the French war came to an end. Since many of the 
grievances of the United States were due to conditions rising 
out of the European war, these ceased with the passing of the 
war. But England made no acknowledgment of sin, paid no 
damages, and gave no pledges for the future. 

The military events were a success in a domestic way, for 
they removed the last danger of an Indian obstruction to American 
expansion. The Mississippi River was now the objective of settle- 
ment. By 1815 there was no barrier in the road that reached it. 
The great Indian groups, whose physical union along the Wabash 
trail was a menace when they listened to a leader like Tecumseh, 
had lost their grip. Harrison and Jackson had finished any talk 
of their successful power of resistance. In the next half decade 
the people poured over the tracts where Tecumseh had hoped to 
see a permanent Indian civilization. The American Government, 
at the same time, stabilized the borders of the United States 
again, for it seemed as though destiny was fulfilled and national 
growth had reached its limit. Upon both the northern and the 
southern borders it was possible to extend the national bound- 
aries to the natural limits of American occupation. 

After the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 it was desirable to 
reduce to writing the boundaries of the United States, but this 
was impossible because of the preoccupation of England and 
France with greater things. With England, the northwest corner 
of the Lake of the Woods was still the furthest point upon which 
there was agreement. Beyond it, Canada and Louisiana met; 
but where, no man could say. The hunters sent out by the 


STABILIZING THE FRONTIER 179 


Montreal Company and Hudson’s Bay Company and the Ameri- 
cans at St. Louis, scrambled for the furs, and paid no more 
attention to national ownership than their fear of each other 
compelled. During the War of 1812, England became de facto 
possessor of most of the contested area, and even of much that 
lay inside the undisputed United States. Upon the outbreak of 
war, her agents, with Indian assistance, seized the American 
posts up to a line indicated by Toledo Bay, Fort Wayne, Peoria, 
and St. Louis. She occupied the trans-Mississippi, and on the 
Pacific took possession of the post at the mouth of the Columbia 
River that John Jacob Astor had caused to be erected. 

Astor was an active promoter of the American fur trade after 
he undertook to finance it in 1808. He proposed to trade out of 
St. Louis and to construct a chain of posts up the Missouri and 
down the Columbia. In 1810 he dispatched a ship to the mouth 
of the Columbia, to found Astoria as his western depot; and in 
1811 he sent an overland expedition to pick the sites for the 
Missouri posts. Astoria was founded just in time to fall into 
British hands at the opening of the war, and the investments of 
Astor were tied up for the next three years. In 1816, with the 
war over and Congress in a mood to reconstruct and protect 
American interests, the western fur companies received friendly 
legislation. It was forbidden for foreign concerns to build and 
operate their stations on American soil. Wherever such posts 
were now found to be, Astor and his associates were in a position 
to buy them out at their own price. An American monopoly of 
the American fur trade was contemplated, and the importance 
of drawing a real boundary between Louisiana and Canada was 
increased. There was a new British settlement on the Red River 
of the North, at Pembina, that seriously encroached upon the 
Missouri River fur field. 

After the war, England returned all conquests, and the United 
States reconstructed its defensive machinery to occupy them. 
The army reorganization was accomplished in 1815, with a re- 
duction of the regular force and a discharge of the volunteers 
and militia who had been taken into Federal service since 1812. 
Small detachments of troops were sent to the old strategic centers 


1 When Thwaites died in 1913, the next piece of work waiting to be done by that inde- 
fatigable scholar was a history of the fur trade, for which the Draper manuscripts in his 
charge provided perhaps the richest single source. The standard book on the subject is 
Hiram M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West (1902), which is the work 
of an army officer who loved the historic background of his profession. 


180 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


of Indian control. During 1816, Fort Howard was built at Green 
Bay, Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien, and Fort Armstrong on 
Rock Island in the Mississippi, at the mouth of the Rock River. 
Fort Scott was built at the same time near the head of the 
Apalachicola to bring peace along the Florida frontier. There 
was every appearance of an intention to occupy the western 
frontier and to protect its settlements. 

The negotiation of the line between Louisiana and Canada was 
taken up at London shortly after the War of 1812, with Albert 
Gallatin and Richard Rush as the American commissioners. 
There was no good reason why it should be one place rather than 
another. <A strict logic might have called for the watershed 
between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, but such a line would 
have been highly irregular. It was easier for the commissioners 
to make a compromise. There was already a starting-point at 
the Lake of the Woods. This was not so very far from the forty- 
ninth parallel of north latitude. An astronomical line was simple 
to describe and easy to locate, whereas that part of the existing 
Canadian boundary that depended on watersheds and river 
sources was a matter of endless controversy between England 
and the United States. It was accordingly agreed that from the 
Lake of the Woods the boundary should proceed in a direct line 
to the forty-ninth parallel, and thence westward. 

The extension of this boundary raised a question over Oregon. 
Commissioners on both sides knew a little, but only a little, of 
the Pacific side of the continent. They knew that Russia held 
Alaska, and extended indefinitely southward; that Spain held 
Mexico and California and extended indefinitely northward; and 
that in the uncertain region of the Russian and Spanish claims, 
both England and the United States had some color of title. 

The basis of the English and American claims to Oregon was 
equally good, or equally weak. The vessels of each nation had 
visited the country, an American master, Gray, having discovered 
the mouth of the Columbia River, and an English master, 
Vancouver, having visited Puget Sound. They had done some- 
thing to found national claims. It was true also that citizens of 
each country had visited the region, overland. Mackenzie had 
crossed Canada to the coast, and Lewis and Clark had followed 
the line of the Missouri and Columbia thither. There were trading 
posts of both nations in the debatable land as well. The Hudson’s 
Bay Company and Astor had both planted their establishments 


STABILIZING THE FRONTIER 181 


near the Columbia River, and the conquests of the former had 
been restored to their American owners after the War of 1812. 
To the commissioners of each country, such claims as these were 
too strong to be surrendered, but not important enough to wreck 
a negotiation over. The distances involved made frequent over- 
land communication improbable. Oregon was nearly as remote 
as China. The commissioners therefore agreed to disagree. 
They concluded a treaty in October, 1818, providing that the 
forty-ninth parallel should be the boundary to the summit of the 
Stony [Rocky] Mountains; and that the Oregon country beyond, 
whose title they contested with both Spain and Russia, should 
be held jointly without prejudice to the rights of either. There 
was to be joint occupation for ten years; and when this term 
expired, it was continued indefinitely, subject to annulment 
upon one year’s notice by either nation. Oregon lay behind the 
horizon of practical politics, and even the Rocky Mountains were 
believed to be separated from the United States by a waste of 
uninhabitable desert. 

While the northern boundary was being fixed at London, John 
Quincy Adams, now Secretary of State, fell heir to a discussion 
of the southern boundary. Spain was involved in this, and the 
Florida and Texas lines were balanced against each other in the 
treaty which he concluded at Washington, February 22, 1819. 
His negotiation was complicated by the claims of the United 
States to West Florida; the invasion of both the Floridas by 
Andrew Jackson; and the disintegration of the Spanish empire 
in America which Henry Clay was furthering by every means 
within his oratorical range. 

The annoyances caused by Spanish Skanes in Florida did 
not cease after Jackson burned Pensacola in 1814. The part of 
West Florida which the United States refrained from occupying 
(extending from the Perdido to the Apalachicola), and all of 
East Florida, possessed no government to speak of. Spain was 
unable to assert herself, and her provinces of South America were 
separating themselves one by one, and forming republican govern- 
ments of their own. The stockades on the Apalachicola con- 
tinued to be haunts for bad Indians, worse white men, and 
fugitive slaves. Their actual aggressions upon American settle- 
ments were less important than the fear that they might commit 
them. The State of Georgia complained that the United States 
garrison at Fort Scott was insufficient, and General Jackson 


182 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


offered to invade Spanish Florida and destroy the centers of 
danger on his own responsibility, if given a hint that such action 
would be welcome to President James Monroe. 

With the dispute between Monroe and Jackson as to whether 
this hint was given, the western historian need have no concern. 
Jackson believed he received it, was in any event ordered to the 
junction of the Chattahoochee and Flint by the War Department, 
and went the rest of the way himself. Early in 1818 he carried 
out his offer, and went so far as to execute abruptly “two un- 
principled villians,” British subjects both, whom he found among 
the Indians under suspicious circumstances. England was an- 
noyed by his summary procedure, and Spain was warned. The 
negotiation of the Spanish boundary was now several years old, 
due chiefly to the Spanish genius for delay. A fear of losing 
Florida by force brought it to a conclusion in 1819. 

The Spanish minister in Washington, de Onis, resumed his 
relations with the American Government in 1815, after the 
restoration of Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne. There had 
been a break in relations between the two countries after the 
attempt of Napoleon to seat his brother, Joseph, there. ‘The 
United States had not recognized the government of Joseph as 
being in accordance with the “consent of the governed,” and had 
withheld the recognition that American policy was already prone 
to extend upon the slightest provocation. It seized part of West 
Florida instead, and established temporary occupation over both 
Pensacola, and Amelia Island on the east coast. It met the 
demand of de Onis for the restoration of these by a suggestion 
for the transfer of Florida, and an establishment of a Louisiana 
boundary. Spain was not ready in 1815 to do either and played 
for time. The negotiation was shifted back and forth between 
Madrid and Washington, and dragged out as did the earlier one 
that concerned the Yazoo strip. 

Adams became Secretary of State when Monroe formed his 
government in 1817, and Henry Clay, who had hoped to receive 
the post, resumed his station as Speaker of the House of Rep- 
resentatives. The great task of Adams was to prevent Spain 
from receiving European aid in an attempt to recover her lost 
colonies. He was not averse to the independence of the colonies, 
but was in no hurry to recognize them. Indeed he wanted to 
defer this until he had brought about a settlement of the boundary 
matters pending; and Spain was showing a disposition to seek 


STABILIZING THE FRONTIER 183 


an American promise not to recognize their independence as a 
condition of the settlement of the boundary dispute. 

Clay became the great congressional advocate of South Amer- 
ican independence and recognition and thundered in their behalf 
for the next five years. His enthusiasm was a part of the normal 
American disposition to encourage self-government and repub- 
licanism. It was intensified by a willingness to embarrass Adams; 
and it did embarrass him. 

The elements in the Spanish settlement were Florida, the 
southwest boundary, and the claims owing to American citizens 
for damage done by Spain during the wars in Europe. As for 
Florida, Spain had come to realize the precarious nature of her 
tenure and was disposed te sell out for the best price. By the 
second article of the treaty of 1819 “His Catholic Majesty” 
ceded to the United States “all the territories which belong to 
him, situated to the eastward of the Mississippi, known by the 
name of East and West Florida.’ The phrasing of the cession 
left undetermined the vexed fact whether he owned any or all of 
West Florida. However acquired, whether from France or Spain, 
the whole of Florida was now attached to the United States. It 
was speedily made a territory, bounded as at present by Georgia 
and Alabama and received as its territorial governor, Andrew 
Jackson, who had done so much to insure its transfer. 

In consideration for the cession of Florida, Spain received an 
indirect payment in cash and a definite boundary for Texas. 
In article nine of the Treaty there was enumerated a long list 
of causes out of which had arisen claims by Americans against 
Spain, and by Spaniards against the United States. These were 
reciprocally renounced, except those of individual Spanish 
officers and inhabitants who might be able to prove that they 
had suffered injuries “by the late operations of the American 
Army in Florida.”’ The United States agreed to reimburse these 
and to pay the lawful claims of Americans against Spain to the 
amount of five million dollars. It was agreed that the United 
States should set up a claims commission, and that Spain should 
furnish all evidence as required. To the extent that Spain was 
hereby relieved of the necessity of paying the American claimants, 
she was compensated for Florida in cash. 

It is improbable that the clauses relating to the southwest 
boundary of the United States would have been agreed to if 
Adams and the Government of which he was a part had known 


184 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


all that his grandson, Henry Adams, knew when he wrote his 
History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas 
Jefferson and James Madison. There was nothing in the treaty 
of cession by France, or the treaty of retrocession by Spain to 
France, or in the original treaty of cession by France to Spain, 
to indicate a certain boundary between Louisiana and the 
Spanish dominions. If Napoleon had been able to occupy Louis- 
iana, he would doubtless have shown by his conduct what he 
believed himself to have received from Spain in 1800. But this 
never took place, and the historian has for his guidance only the 
secret instructions prepared for the prospective Captain General 
of Louisiana, which Napoleon approved November 26, 1802, 
before he decided to sell Louisiana to the United States. In this 
document Louisiana was described as “‘bounded on the west by 
the river called Rio Bravo [Rio Grande del Norte] from its mouth 
to about the thirtieth degree parallel.’’ Beyond this point, even 
Napoleon was uncertain; but if the United States had been aware 
that he had included Texas in his Louisiana there could have been 
no willingness to give it up as compensation for Florida in 1819. 

The American Secretary of State was reluctant to surrender 
Texas, unaware though he was of Napoleon’s intention to occupy 
it. But the Government and the people still failed to see its im- 
portance in the territorial scheme of the United States. Florida 
was close-to, and imperative, if the Government was to have 
peace with the Southern States. Texas lay far to the West. Mi- 
gration thither was not yet under way, and the line of the Sabine 
River, established in Wilkinson’s modus vivendi with the Spanish 
military forces, still appeared to mark a point of easy equilibrium. 
What little was known of the country beyond the Mississippi 
River was discouraging. Along its immediate course lay many — 
miles of inundated swamps. There was a narrow strip of habitable 
land, wide enough for a tier of new States, but beyond the lower 
Missouri and lower Arkansas were vast desert plains. Every 
traveler who had visited the buffalo range and the country of the 
wild Indians had reported adversely upon its suitability for white 
occupation. ‘There was growing the myth of the American Desert 
that was to hold the United States contentedly within its bound- 
aries for another generation. Deliberate expansion was never 
a part of American policy, and in 1819 it was easy to balance an 
immediate Florida against a remote Texas. 

Before Adams and de Onis devised the boundary formula that 


STABILIZING THE FRONTIER 185 


was finally inserted in their treaty, they discussed the possibility 
of reaching a compromise at nearly every stream emptying into 
the Gulf of Mexico between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande. 
De Onis demanded at first a line following the precise watershed 
of the Mississippi, which would have left much of present Louis- 
jana in Texas. Both negotiators yielded reluctantly to persuasion 
and the inclusion of other desirable matters in the treaty, until 
at last the boundary was written upon a basis of the de facto 
military boundary, with deviation northward to keep the line 
away from the Spanish settlements on the upper Rio Grande in 
New Mexico. Beginning in the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth 
of the Sabine River, the line followed the western bank of that 
stream to its intersection with the thirty-second parallel of north 
latitude; thence it ran due north to the Red River, and up the 
south bank to the one hundredth meridian of west longitude. 
Here it crossed the Red River and ran north along the meridian 
to the Arkansas River, thus making the desired detour around 
Santa Fé. It continued up the Arkansas to its source and north 
to the forty-second parallel of latitude and thence west to the 
Pacific. The two countries renounced forever their respective 
claims to lands lying beyond the boundary thus described. 

The Spanish treaty was signed on February 22, 1819, some 
four months after the agreement with England upon a northern 
boundary for Louisiana. It was a frank compromise, concluded 
with difficulty amid a political din raised by Henry Clay, whose 
demand for immediate recognition of the Latin republics exas- 
perated Spain and whose attack upon Adams for the surrender 
of Texas somewhat obscured the general nature of the settlement. 
It was, however, ratified in due time. For the moment it appeared 
as if the United States had reached its territorial growth. The 
military events of the early part of the decade had cleared the 
way for a wave of migration and settlement on either side of the 
Ohio, and along the Mississippi. Diplomacy had now stabilized 
the foreign boundaries, except the unimportant line along the 
Rockies between Louisiana and Oregon. No enemy, Indian or 
foreign, was able to stop the full development of so much of the 
area of the United States as was fit for settlement; and beyond 
this area, along its western edge, the arid uplands of the Rocky 
Mountains were believed to constitute both a barrier to too 
spacious expansion, and an insulator between the United States 
and its neighbors on the continent. 


CHAPTER XxXI 
THE GREAT MIGRATION 


Tuis westward flow of population has been characteristic of 
American growth since the period of the earliest settlements. 
In an intermittent way it has been characteristic of British 
growth since the accession of King James I. It has been kept in 
motion by two forces, one of which is ever-present in society; 
the other has been peculiar to the British and American empires. 
The constant force is the necessity upon society to take care of 
the new adults, arriving each year at manhood, and requiring 
opportunity for livelihood. In a stagnant society these new 
arrivals find their niches arranged by the generation ahead of 
them and must take what they can get. Birth tends to determine 
station, and the rare individual who dies in a social position more 
elevated than his father held becomes a hero around whom 
legends accumulate as inevitably as those that make Dick 
Whittington a model for the nursery. If we could know for any 
society, at any age, the full story of the placement of each new 
generation, we should understand much of its history. In the 
United States youth rose to manhood as certainly as elsewhere, 
and boundless opportunity lay concealed beneath the stumps 
and sod of the frontier farms. 

The peculiar force that directed the newer generation towards 
the West, as they sought their jobs, was the supply of unclaimed 
land that could be had in unlimited amounts. The American, 
who has ever thought of it as something to be bought when 
needed and scrapped when used-up, has difficulty in understanding 
the magnetic call of free land for those who have retained the 
European tradition of its scarcity. Throughout the time of 
American settlement, the lands of western Europe have been in 
private ownership. Values have not been fixed by productivity, 
but have been enhanced by the social prestige that has been 
associated with the freehold. In the United States the Govern- 
ment has been the primal owner but without a desire to maintain 
a “‘crown estate” or to retard its sale. To be able to acquire 
iand at all was enough to turn the eyes of millions of Europeans 
towards the United States in the last century. To get it cheaply 


THE GREAT MIGRATION 187 


was almost beyond belief. In the nineteenth century the immi- 
grant came to settle on the western lands, following the Americans 
who took it all for granted and who for several generations in- 
stinctively recalled the fact that farms were to be had in the 
West, when they reached the age that calls for social independence 
and seli-support. The annual class of young people seeking work 
is common to society; the call of the western lands is the peculiar 
American note. 

If there had been nothing more than these two forces, there 
would have been a westward movement that would have played 
a part in American history. There were, however, two types of 
special stimuli that served to make the flow irregular and to 
swell it at times to the proportions of flood. It was always true 
that many of each new generation could be placed at home. Some 
inherited wealth, and others married it. Many had positions wait- 
ing for them. Some were so timid that they accepted lowly occupa- 
tions rather than risk the dangers of the unknown. The proportion 
of each generation that was ready to follow the trails to the border 
was subject to fluctuation; it could be increased by advertising 
that drew attention to western opportunity or by hard times 
that increased the difficulty of finding work. When it happened 
that special notoriety for the West coincided with depression or 
panic in the East the tide of migration reached its highest peaks. 

In the middle of the eighteenth century came an early wave 
that poured the Germans and the Scotch-Irish into the Great 
Valley. Poverty, religion, and the devastation that followed war 
were among the special causes; as was systematic advertising 
of the attractions of the Pennsylvania and Virginia lands. The 
movement never stopped, but it slowed down somewhat during 
the years of the Revolution and prepared for a second crest to be 
reached in the administrations of Washington and Adams. The 
wars in the Northwest Territory, and the various intrigues in the 
Southwest were among the western provocatives of this migra- 
tion, for war and pestilence could advertise the West nearly as 
effectively as peace and bumper crops. Hard times in the com- 
mercial towns of the Atlantic contributed the element of re- 
pulsion. The Anglo-French war upset trade conditions, and by 
interference and seizure both combatants created hard times for 
Americans. Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee, with Ohio as 
an aftermath, are the States of this second wave. 

In the first five years of the new century the East was pros- 


188 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


perous. The belligerents had to eat, yet they had cut down their 
own productivity by war. American foods and naval stores were 
in demand, as well as American-built ships to meet the naval 
shortage. Commerce and trade flourished in the artificial climate 
of foreign war, and the westward movement slumped. 

About 1805 the rise begins again. The British merchants could 
no longer stand what they attacked as “‘The Frauds of the Neu- 
tral Flags,’ and brought effective pressure upon their Govern- 
ment to stop American profits incurred at their expense. England 
and France started upon their commercial war, with the “con- 
tinental system” and by successive Orders in Council and Im- 
perial Decrees struck at each other through the neutral United 
States. Jefferson retaliated in 1807 with his embargo. However 
effective this may have been in coercing Europe, it was a suc- 
cessful means of bringing an era of American prosperity to an 
abrupt end. Embargo was followed by non-intercourse in various 
shapes, and this by war; and at the wharves of New England 
and the Middle States the useless American merchant ships lay 
tied up until they rotted. Commerce went bankrupt with the 
ship-builders, the gay coast towns became dark and silent, and 
the younger generation remembered that after all there was the 
West as a resort. The depression that accompanied war in- 
creased the western drift. And after war followed peace with 
commercial horrors quite as great. Both commerce and manu- 
facture had looked forward to peace as a means of reviving profits, 
but peace in Europe came at the same time and made it impossible 
for the artificial prosperity of the beginning of the century ever 
to recur. English ships could now carry British goods, and there 
was no place for Americans. English manufacturers dumped 
upon the American market their odds and ends accumulated 
during the prolonged contest with Napoleon; and sold them not 
through the American storekeeper but at special auctions and at 
bargain prices. The new American manufacturers that had built 
up business behind the protective bulwark of non-intercourse and 
war were a special object of enmity, and the British manufac- 
turers suffered an immediate loss with complacency as they 
thought that by doing it they were driving to bankruptcy these 
American competitors. With trade, commerce, and manufacture 
hit again, the eastern. depression outlasted the War of 1812, and 
was protracted through most of that decade, giving constant 
stimulus to the homeseeker in the West. 


THE GREAT MIGRATION 189 


The prolonged unsettlement of the Eastern States was matched 
by spectacular advertisement of the Ohio Valley. Beginning with 
the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, there was hardly a moment for 
fifteen years in which the West was not attracting considerable 
attention from the whole nation. Published results of explora- 
tion began to be obtainable before the war was over. Pike’s book 
on New Mexico was followed by the Biddle edition of journals 
relating to the Lewis and Clark expedition. 

For nearly two years Aaron Burr was a focal point with refer- 
ence both to the Mississippi Valley and the politics of Jefferson’s 
Administration. His reconnoissance, his expedition, and _ his 
trial for treason brought into fierce publicity his own “damaged 
soul”’ (as Gamaliel Bradford puts it), as well as the resources that 
he sought to exploit. Interest in him was hardly gone, when 
the mutterings along the Wabash were heard, and the fame of 
William Henry Harrison began to rise. Indian wars were ever a 
means of official prospecting for desirable lands. The militiamen 
could not be restrained from observation, and the administration 
of the land law was for the purpose of advancing settlement. The 
normal course of the war brought western lands into further 
prominence, for Congress voted a land bounty for enlistments. 

The land bonus of the War of 1812 was hoped to be an in- 
centive to recruiting, but proved to be Dead Sea fruit for those 
who relied upon it. By act of December, 1811, a tract of one 
hundred and sixty acres from the public domain was promised, 
upon discharge, for every enlisted man and non-commissioned 
officer of the regular army. The unit was later increased to three 
hundred and twenty acres, and the eligibles were increased by 
the inclusion of certain of the volunteer troops. In all, nearly 
thirty thousand warrants for bounty lands were issued by the 
War Department, recorded on the books of the General Land 
Office in the Treasury Department, and allowed to be filled by 
lot from certain military tracts created in the West. The tract in 
Illinois, west of the Illinois River, was most important of these; 
but the settlers who moved into it were in few instances the 
veterans for whose recompense the warrants were issued. The 
bounty sounded important, but since the lands must be accepted 
in a predetermined tract, and by lot at that, it failed to accomplish 
its purpose. None the less it helped to announce the presence of 
open lands, and to increase the number of western-minded settlers. 
The wide notoriety of Roosevelt’s steamboat, that was launched 
in 1811, worked to the same end. 


1909 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Every campaign along the western border during the war 
with England prepared the way for a new rush of settlers after 
the war was closed. Hull and Harrison, in turn, led considerable 
armies beyond the line of the northwest farms into the Indian 
country between the Wabash and Detroit. The campaigns in 
New York, with Niagara, Sackett’s Harbor, and Plattsburg in 
view, had the same result. Andrew Jackson led his southern 
troops first to Natchez, then through central Alabama to Mobile, 
and then to New Orleans, opening up as never before a knowledge 
of Mississippi Territory. Even the disasters of the war, like 
Detroit, Fort Mims, and the battle at the River Raisin broadened 
popular knowledge of the country; while such a victory as New 
Orleans meant its thousands of homeseekers headed thither. 

The hard times that persisted in much of the East after 1807 
were not fully relieved until after 1819. In all these years the 
West was continually before the public, with one spectacle after 
another to command the interest. The accelerated flow of popu- 
lation is clearly visible after 1811 and assumes huge proportions 
after 1815. It shows itself in the noise of the migration, in the 
heavy sales of western lands, and in the creation within six 
years of six new border States: Indiana (1816), Mississippi 
(1817), Lllinois (1818), Alabama (1819), Maine (1820), and 
Missouri (1821). 

The preceding wave of migration, that reached its crest about 
the date of the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, was followed 
by the admission of Ohio, as a sort of aftermath. The great 
migration was preceded by Louisiana, and perhaps increased 
by it. Her two senators and single representative were added to 
the six senators and twenty-two representatives already in Con- 
gress, under the apportionment of 1811, who came from States 
lying wholly beyond the line of the Proclamation of 1763. New 
England was right in observing the shift in federal balance; but 
the worst was to come in the next years. Louisiana was a dis- 
connected forerunner of the six border States that followed the 
War of 1812. 


CHAPTER XXII 
STATEHOOD ON THE OHIO: INDIANA AND ILLINOIS 


THE career of William Henry Harrison, as governor of Indiana 
Territory, came tc an end when he received a commission as 
major-general in the army of the United States and undertook 
the reorganization of the military defenses of the Northwest 
Border. Thomas Posey, who succeeded him, found a community 
less developed than Ohio had been when Arthur St. Clair retired, 
but one that had worked with instead of against its ruler. St. Clair 
had remained Federalist in spite of the temper of the frontier; 
Harrison was a Democrat at all times. Indiana, before 1810, was 
reduced to an approximation of its final shape, and separate 
governments in Michigan (1805), Missouri (1805), and Illinois 
(1809) administered parts of what was Harrison’s domain. 

The third census of the United States, taken in 1810, revealed 
the fact that the frontier of six settlers to the square mile still 
ran south of the line of the Indian cession at the Treaty of Green- 
ville. There were indeed 230,760 inhabitants in Ohio, but most 
of them lived close to the Ohio River. Cleveland and the Con- 
necticut Reserve were still unimportant, and into the Fire Lands 
tract at the west end of the reserve, settlers were beginning to 
enter in 1809. The Indians along the south shore of Lake Erie 
were dispossessed, and the Ohio legislature, creating Huron 
County in 1809 for the Fire Lands purchasers, was extending 
the initial stages of white government to its northern limits. 

Below Cincinnati, the frontier line skirted the river in 1810. 
Most of Indiana lay beyond it. There were little localities of 
thicker settlement at Clark’s Grant and Vincennes and on the 
Mississippi below St. Louis, but there had been little develop- 
ment beyond Cincinnati since the beginning of the century. At 
Detroit, Mackinaw, Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and a few 
other spots were the communities of the fur traders, that the 
British took with ease in 1812 and restored in 1815. Real emi- 
gration was still running either to Ohio or south of it to Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee. The census enumerators found in Indiana 
24,520 people; and in the outlying colonies fewer yet: Michigan 
4762 and Illinois 12,282. 

Throughout the decade just closing, Indiana had been handi- 


192 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


capped by the presence of Indians, and Governor Harrison’s 
greatest task was to find a means of persuading them to sell and 
move. There was no great difficulty in securing United States 
title to the lands along the Ohio River, for here few Indians 
maintained a permanent residence; the difficulty came in the 
center of Indiana and in the North. As early as 1805 successful 
treaties had been concluded with the Kaskaskia, the Piankeshaw, 
and the Sauk and Fox by which the whole right bank of the Ohio 
and the left bank of the Mississippi below Prairie du Chien, were 
conceded by these tribes to belong to the United States. The 
native tribes continued to live there, but if these treaties had any 
value they indicated cessation of Indian ownership. It was as 
Harrison moved inland that his troubles multiplied. His great 
conference at Fort Wayne in September, 1809, described by local 
historians as the most momentous since Greenville, was at once 
the first step to new occupation and the final stroke in welding an 
Indian opposition under Tecumseh. Richmond, Indiana, ““Queen 
of all the Hoosier Plain,” lay at the head of the old “‘gore,”’ and 
became the “jumping-off place” at once for new occupants of the 
twelve-mile strip negotiated at Fort Wayne. The Quakers from 
North Carolina were already here, and their yearly meeting that 
was soon established, spread a new influence through the border 
groups. The central part of the territory, as reduced in 1809, was 
not ceded until 1818; the North remained Indian country for an- 
other decade. Simultaneously, in 1819, the Kickapoo ceded their 
claim south of Rock Island and opened central Illinois. 

The advance guard of the great migration was showing itself 
at the time of the Treaty of Fort Wayne, and every year there- 
after it pushed along the traces that the earliest pioneers had 
blazed. With the irresistible momentum of a glacier it chose the 
easiest routes and altered the aspect of the country as it passed. 
Before the fourth census was taken in 1820 the population north 
of the Ohio more than doubled, Ohio alone receiving more than 
that of the whole area in 1800. There were in Ohio in 1820, 
581,295 settlers. Enough pushed beyond Ohio to lift Indiana 
out of the class of little border groups and to give it active self- 
consciousness with a population of 147,178. Illinois and Michigan 
grew with less freedom, the latter to 8765, the former to 55,162. 
In this increase of northwest population from 272,000 to 793,000 
in a single decade is to be found the explanation of many of the 
social forces that have continued since 1820 to operate there. 


STATEHOOD ON THE OHIO 193 


The river towns received the incoming homeseekers. There 
was no local road of great importance. Zane’s Trace across Ohio 
had no real parallel in Indiana, and the settlers stuck to the 
navigable streams with unfailing persistence. The valley of the 
White Water, in eastern Indiana, cutting across both the gore 
and the twelve-mile strip, was the earliest recipient of the new 
invasion. Somewhat below its mouth on the Ohio, Lawrenceburg 
was the furthest upstream of the Indiana towns and was a dis- 
tributing center for settlers and trade after its founding about 
1802. Regular river packets connected it with Cincinnati, which 
it was ambitious to outstrip; and past Lawrenceburg drifted the 
hordes of emigrants who sought homes less near to the settled 
parts of Ohio. 

Jeffersonville and New Albany came next among the aspiring 
Indiana towns. The former of these lies just across the river 
from Louisville, at the Falls of the Ohio; the latter a few miles 
downstream. Both derived what importance they had from the 
speculations in land lying in the George Rogers Clark grant, and 
the residents of each hoped to capture some of the strategic 
importance held by Louisville. As the river traffic increased, 
with flats multiplying in number and the occasional steamboat 
snorting along after 1811, it was possible to capitalize the local 
value of the Falls, for here cargoes had to be repacked, pilots 
sngaged, temporary lodgings secured, and supplies replenished. 
Behind New Albany and Jeffersonville, towards Salem and the 
east fork of the White River, another Indiana community was 
taking shape. 

Corydon, in Harrison County, Indiana, became the seat of 
government of the territory during the War of 1812, although 
it was not on the Ohio River. Its situation on the Indian Creek, 
which empties not far below Louisville, was good enough however 
for it to be a fair rival of the immediate river towns, and politics 
gave to it an importance similar to theirs. Evansville, much 
further down the Ohio, and not far east of the mouth of the 
Wabash River, rose rapidly from its foundation in 1812 to county 
seat in 1814. 

The Wabash, with its great eastern tributary, the White River, 
was a well-known highway before the era of American immigra- 
tion into Indiana began. The French were here around Vincennes: 
and above Vincennes, past Fort Harrison at Terre Haute, past 
Prophetstown, and on towards Tippecanoe Creek, settlers were 


194 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ready to force their way as soon as it was safe. During most of 
the second decade of the century the Indiana settlement was 
roughly U-shaped, following the course of the Ohio and the 
Wabash, with the extremities separated by unoccupied wilder- 
ness, through which ran the east fork of the White. To New 
Harmony, on the lower Wabash, there came about 1814 a re- 
ligious colony of Rappists; and these were succeeded in the next 
decade by a community of Owenites, neither of them finding on 
the frontier the harmony or economic peace for which they were 
hopefully in search. 

The catalogue of the river towns, through which settlement 
seeped into Indiana and Illinois territories, continues below the 
Wabash, and around the great peninsula that separates the Ohio 
from the Mississippi. There were fewer towns in Illinois, chiefly 
because Illinois was further away and because the homeseeker 
was likely to find satisfaction or lose his zest for penetration 
before he reached the mouth of the Wabash. St. Louis, on the 
Missouri side, was near to the northern limit of settlement before 
1820. Alton, on the eastern bank between the mouths of the 
Illinois and Missouri, and Edwardsville, which lay a little inland, 
and a trifle further south, were the Illinois claimants for the 
greatness of St. Louis as New Albany and Jeffersonville were for 
that of Louisville. Shawneetown, on the Ohio just below the 
Wabash, had its ambitions; while Cahokia and Kaskaskia on the 
Mississippi were reminiscent of unimportant French beginnings. 

The map of Indian cessions gives the other side of frontier 
extension after the War of 1812. It was only a matter of detail 
to get rid of the remaining tribes in the Northwest, but they were 
not removed until they came underfoot of the advancing popu- 
lation. In 1817, 1818, and 1819 there were considerable cessions 
along and north of what is now the direct route between Toledo 
and St. Louis. Until after 1817 the actual outlying settlements, 
beyond which there was no white life worth much attention, were 
_in the Fire Lands, at Richmond and Terre Haute in Indiana and 
at Alton, Illinois. The Ohio River was parent of the communities 
as yet. No important land highway except Zane’s Trace lay 
north of it. Not until 1818 was the Cumberland Road finished, 
to connect the Northwest with the East. From this date there 
rises a new spirit of demand for better roads, and at last pene- 
tration north of the frontier becomes more active. The National 
Road, west of Wheeling, begun in 1825, was to serve the newest 


STATEHOOD ON THE OHIO 195 


settlements that had worked so far inland that the tributaries 
of the Ohio were shrunk too small to be of help. Each of the 
river towns at the entry thought of itself as a future metropolis 
of the West and built up arguments showing why it, rather than 
any neighbor, possessed the real assets for success. To-day, none 
of them between Cincinnati and St. Louis has achieved its am- 
bition, and some of them have nearly disappeared. 

From a population of 24,520 in 1810, Indiana grew to 147,178 
in 1820 and was conscious at the close of the War of 1812 of 
having passed the mark of 60,000 set by the Northwest Ordi- 
nance. The statehood idea that had buzzed between 1800 and 
1803 for Ohio, buzzed again in 1815 when a territorial census 
enumerated more than 63,000 Hoosiers in thirteen counties. 
Just why they were called Hoosiers and what unkind significance 
the term had when it appeared in print during the thirties, is not 
quite clear, but the name stuck and became a badge of pride. 
~The population came predominantly from Kentucky or the 
South behind it. The local poet before long (1833) sang its 
praises: 


** Blest Indiana! in her soil, 
Men seek the sure rewards of toil.... 
Men who can legislate or plough, 
Wage politics, or milk a cow, 
So plastic are their various parts, 
That in the circle of the arts, 
With equal tact, the ‘Hoosier’ loons 
Hunt offices, or hunt raccoons.” 


The versatility of the frontiersman, and the political aptitude 
of the Hoosier, were apparent before 1815 in the maneuvering for 
county government and county seats. There are few themes in 
the recorded history of the early communities that yield more 
significant results than do these controversies, with reference to 
the extension of settlement. Herbert Quick, in Vandemark’s 
Folly (1921), has told the tale in the truthful guise of fiction for a 
later frontier; but the story applies with equal truth to the process 
by which these unacquainted newcomers first shook down into 
a civic relationship. 

Congress enabled Indiana to form a constitution by act of 
April 19, 1816, after receiving a petition to that effect from the 
legislature of the territory. In the enabling law a boundary 
problem, similar to that which had disturbed the Ohio con- 


196 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER | 


vention and which remained unsettled until 1837, was settled 
to the satisfaction of the new State. The original boundaries, 
defined in the Ordinance of 1787 in case there should be three 
States in the Northwest, called for north and south lines fixed 
by the Great Miami, and Vincennes; and these were adopted 
without hesitation. If five States were to be formed, the divider 
should be drawn east and west through the southern tip of Lake 
Michigan. It was against this line that Ohio protested, asserting 
a claim to more territory and an assured frontage on Lake Erie, 
and defining a Northern boundary running directly from the tip of 
Lake Michigan to the north cape of the Maumee River. Indiana 
had a similar complaint, even more vexatious because the meeting 
point of its northern and western boundary lines left it inten- 
tionally with no room for a port on Lake Michigan. Congress 
recognized the grievance and established a new northern line to 
be drawn ten miles north of the original boundary. This allowed 
Indiana to have lake frontage wide enough for six ranges of 
townships, in which to-day a great industrial community has 
been developed. The fact that both the Ohio and the Indiana 
adjustment were at the expense of the future State of Michigan 
made no difference when Michigan was a territory with under 
ten thousand inhabitants. 

The Indiana constitutional convention met at Corydon and 
sat for nineteen days in June, 1816.! No record of its debates was 
kept. Few of its members had received formal education, and 
none appears to have cared to keep an informing diary or to 
write instructive letters upon the discussions. The official journal 
is a barren skeleton of resolves and votes. The constitutions of 
the neighbor States were drawn upon, more perhaps because 
they expressed the prevalent ideas of government than because 
they were consciously copied. The members of the convention, 
unskilled though they were in formal letters, showed no diffidence 
about their task. In less than three weeks they met, appointed 
a dozen or more committees to bring in provisions for the several 
sections of the document, divided and sat in their various com- 
mittees, reported back their results, brought the proposals into 
harmony in a committee on revision and adjourned after pro- 
claiming the constitution to be the law of Indiana. Democratic 


1 Charles Kettleborough, Constitution Making in Indiana (1916), was prepared in con- 
nection with recent attempts made by that State to revise or amend its constitution of 
1850, which is almost unamendable. 


STATEHOOD ON THE OHIO 197 


though they were, to a man, they saw no inconsistency in the 
promulgation of a constitution by a small group of framers. 
Congress admitted Indiana December 11, 1816. 

Illinois was two years behind Indiana in time. Several years 
after admission the population was still under the required 
60,000, but Congress that had fixed the figure could modify the 
test. There had been a legislature at Kaskaskia since 1812, and 
Ninian Edwards, the only territorial governor of Illinois, was a 
worthy peer of Harrison and St. Clair. He was born in Maryland, 
moved to Kentucky in the year of the Greenville Treaty, and 
was chief justice of Kentucky when named by President Madison 
as Governor of Illinois, at the age of thirty-four. 

~The Illinois Enabling Act passed Congress in April, 1818, as 
a routine procedure that had now become standardized. The 
most significant feature that it contained was again a boundary 
matter. Having given Indiana a little, Congress gave Illinois 
-much. Instead of adhering to the Ordinance line, Illinois was 
offered the territory between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi 
River for some sixty miles north of the southern end of the lake, 
to 42° 30’ north latitude. What was cut off from Illinois Terri- 
tory, with the remainder from Indiana, was added to Michigan 
Territory, which was thus extended to the Mississippi River. 

When the convention met at Kaskaskia on August 3, 1818, to 
frame the Illinois constitution, it is doubtful whether there were 
forty thousand people in the prospective State, and they were 
sparsely spread over an unwieldy area. The farmer members, 
however, acted as promptly as though they represented an im- 
portant community and framed and promulgated a democratic 
constitution in twenty-three days. Not for fifteen years did 
another free State frame an initial constitution, and never again 
was a western free constitution placed in force by promulgation. 
The effects of population shift and its liberalizing tendencies were 
bringing about another view of the meaning of democratic 
control. 

The question of slavery made an appearance in Illinois as it 
had done in both Indiana and Ohio, in varying degrees, in spite 
of the prohibition of the Ordinance of 1787. Down to the date 
of the admission of II]linois it was hardly more than an incidental 
issue; a mild vexation that a slave-holding citizen of Kentucky 
or Virginia could not take his slave property with him into the 
public territory of the United States without running the risk of 


198 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


losing it. The Ordinance was explicit in its prohibition: “There 
shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said 
territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof 
the party shall have been duly convicted.” It was regarded as a 
permanent provision, based upon a compromise made in the old 
Congress, but like most matters of American law, its enforcement 
was difficult in a community that failed to approve it, and it 
never escaped some violations. Occasional slaves were taken into 
the Northwest Territory, and later into the Territories of Indiana 
and Illinois. There was little sentiment for the use of slaves and 
little profit to be derived from their exploitation. But many of 
the colonists, especially those from slave-holding regions, inclined 
to resent the provision that forbade their bringing in slaves if 
they so desired. Few of the earliest settlers were well enough off 
to have many slaves, but there were occasional domestic servants, 
as much friend as property, who were brought north of the Ohio 
and kept there in what the law would have regarded as slavery, 
had it been enforced. 

There was more of this sentiment In Tans than in Ohio, for 
here the southern immigrant strain was more nearly dominant 
than in Ohio. Harrison knew there were slaves held in Vincennes 
and Kaskaskia and thought the fault was in the law rather than 
in the slavery. A convention held at Vincennes early in his 
career as governor begged Congress to suspend the slavery pro- 
hibition because it was driving settlers to Missouri at the expense 
of Indiana. The southern influence and origin became more 
powerful as it pushed further west. Illinois was more interested 
in slaves than Indiana. The division of Indiana in 1809 there- 
fore cut off so many slavery supporters that in what remained 
Indiana it was not hard to prevent any considerable spread of 
slavery feeling. The Indiana constitution declared “‘that all men 
are born equally free and independent,”’ and forbade slavery, 
in the very language of the Ordinance. It however recognized 
the southern parentage of most of its population in requiring 
that apportionments should be based on free white citizens as 
Ohio had done in 1803 and in excluding negroes from the militia. 

Progressively, as the frontier moved down the Ohio Valley, 
the southern heritage became more complete, and the disin- 
clination to exclude slavery became stronger. There were few 
settlers who desired to go to Illinois on any terms before 1820; 
and fewer still had slaves or could use them there with profit. 


STATEHOOD ON THE OHIO 199 


But the common sentiment was such that the apportionment and 
the vote in the constitution of 1818 were limited to whites; and 
the whole of Article VI was devoted to something less than a 
whole-hearted program that “‘Neither slavery nor involuntary 
servitude shall hereafter be introduced.” The existing slaves and 
indentured servants were recognized, subject to the law that the 
children of negroes and mulattoes, the women at eighteen and the 
men at twenty-one, should become free. The first legislature of 
the new State adopted a black code that came near to reéstab- 
lishing slavery for the free negroes, and for several years there 
was an Imposing movement to amend the constitution so as to 
admit slavery without question. The southern end of Illinois, 
the area of first settlement, became “Egypt” during this political 
struggle. In 1824, however, after a violent political campaign, 
a proposed slavery amendment was beaten by a vote of five to 
four. The slavery question was settled for Illinois; but it had 
become a larger issue, dividing the whole United States into 
divergent social groups. 


CHAPTER XXIII 
THE COTTON KINGDOM: MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA 


It is a matter of profound historical significance that the children 
of the South, educated in States in which slaves were chattels, 
could none the less free themselves from the institution of slavery 
during their first generation of residence north of the Ohio River. 
A heavy preponderance of the residents of the Old Northwest in 
1820 came from Virginia or the country further south. Many to 
be sure had lived in the piedmont and mountain country where 
slaves were few, but the family names of tidewater, plantation 
Virginia were spread over the counties of the new States so freely 
as to prove the continuity of blood. Slavery was unpopular in 
the North, but more than that, it was unprofitable. An occasional 
domestic servant and a few field hands were found in the States 
of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, despite the Ordinance; but the 
movement to permit the general introduction of this type of 
labor was never able to command the support of more than a 
minority of the population. The Northwest was started free by 
the Ordinance of 1787; it remained free because of underlying 
economic conditions. 

Slavery did not pay even in the southern States where it sur- 
vived and flourished, but it was less unprofitable. Hf free labor 
had been available to do the work imposed upon the negroes, it 
would have been impossible for the system of slavery to stand 
up in competition with it. In only a few industries was the South 
able to work the slaves without absolute loss, and in these the 
method of work and the type of organization were dictated by 
the difficulties inherent in getting a safe profit out of ignorant 
and indifferent bondsmen. Never did southern capital produce 
as high a return as northern, never was it as abundant, never was 
its possessor as free to take advantage of opportunity. The 
southern planter owned his slaves, but in as true a sense they 
owned him and bound him to a narrow repetition of unprofitable 
operations. Except in the great fields devoted to cotton, tobacco, 
hemp, rice, and indigo, and in the domestic work around the 
planter’s home, the South could not use slaves freely. In the 
typical process of clearing away the timber and making farms, 


THE COTTON KINGDOM 201 


that gave to pioneering its essential character, they were almost 
useless. 

After nearly two centuries of existence in the English colonies, 
slavery was at the time of the framing of the Federal Constitution 
“in the course of ultimate extinction.” There was hardly a person 
of importance in the South, where the slaves were most nu- 
merous, who did not believe the system was bad as well as un- 
profitable. The effects upon the negro as well as upon his owner 
were demoralizing and did not tend to perpetuate the type of 
character that the American frontier bred. It was possible to 
insert in the Constitution of 1787 a provision allowing the ul- 
timate prohibition of importation of slaves and abolition of the 
slave trade. And when the date for this came round in 1808, 
it was possible to act upon it. Leading southerners still believed 
in emancipation and belonged to anti-slavery societies; and in 
the North where there was no problem of what to do with the 
freed negroes, slavery was rapidly disappearing. There was 
nothing that the slave could do that the white farmer could not 
do better; and there was no crop so profitable that it paid to ex- 
ploit it at the cost that negro labor entailed. The children of these 
southern States, who knew slavery as it was before 1808, were 
able to live without it after they had gone through the experiences 
of frontier planting in the Northwest. 

Cotton proved to be the crop whose profits made negro labor 
yield a net return. The economic historians have shown that the 
fiber of the cotton boll was only an interesting curiosity until 
near the end of the eighteenth century. It was possible to raise 
it in a large part of the South, and in a few spots, soil and climate 
were right for the production of fine qualities with long silky 
threads. But it was impracticable to prepare it for the wheel and 
loom because of the seeds entangled in the fiber. The problem 
of lowering the cost of cleaning it intrigued the attention of 
many planters, without result, until in 1793 the Yankee tutor, Eli 
Whitney, turned to it while residing with a southern patron. 
The cotton gin that Whitney made was so simple that he could 
never control the profits arising from his patent; and so effective 
that it brought about an economic revolution in the South and 
improved the comfort of mankind for all time. 

Once it became possible to produce cotton at reasonable cost, 
its high adaptability for textile manufactures gave it a market. 
The textiles of the eighteenth century, whether wool, linen, or 


202 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


silk, were all expensive, and their cost limited most of the world 
to few garments, and these were worn indefinitely. The hand 
labor with needle and thread added to the expense. It may be 
doubted whether any inventions have done so much for human 
comfort as the gin which made cotton cheap, and the sewing 
machine which made clothing manufacture easy. But the bene- 
fits that Whitney offered to the world did not improve the con- 
dition of the negro barbarian in the heart of Africa whose body 
could be seized and turned by force to labor for another’s benefit. 
The prohibition of the African slave trade had hardly become 
law before smugglers were ready to violate it, attracted by the 
rising price of prime field hands to work the southern cotton fields. 
By 1815, when the great migration was fully under way the 
southern stream of migrants had before them, and above all 
other ends, the hope of developing new cotton lands and making 
a crop for which there was an endless market. The trouble of 
the northern frontiersman in finding a market did not worry the 
South. | 

The plantation system that developed in the cotton fields had 
an economic organization determined not so much by slavery 
as by negro labor. The planter with a gang of negroes was forced 
to develop a system for their use, the controlling facts being that 
the workmen were fresh from barbarism where they were un- 
accustomed to labor, were illiterate and often unacquainted with 
the simplest words of English, and were in many instances of low 
grade intelligence. The illuminating research of Ulrich B. Phillips 
and Alfred H. Stone has made it possible to-day to see further 
into the real meaning of slavery than the abolitionists could, and 
to realize how inevitable the plantation was, once siavery and 
cotton were brought together.! 

Because of the defects in the planters’ labor supply, it was 
necessary to work the hands under close supervision. The brighter 
slaves found themselves in demand around the house or with the 
horses or in practicing the common crafts about the shop. But 
most of the slaves were useful only in the field; and hither they 


1 After years of preparation that began with his Justin Winsor prize essay, Georgia and 
State Rights (1902), and A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt (1908), 
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips has at last produced his treatise on American Negro Slavery (1918). 
Probably none of our historians has more nearly mastered this theme. Alfred H. Stone, 
from the standpoint of a modern planter in the black belt, has done much to make it clear 
that the negro labor supply rather than the legal institution of slavery shaped the Old 
South; Studies in the American Race Problem (1908). 


THE COTTON KINGDOM 203 


were sent with white overseers. Men and women worked to- 
gether, and in common tasks they were happiest and most pro- 
ductive. It was the business of the overseer to simplify the 
routine of work. A gang of field hands, laboring side by side, 
each with his row of cotton to hoe or pick, singing crude chants 
to melodies that they had brought from Africa, did the best work 
of which they were capable. But the organization necessary for 
this division of labor tested the resources of the planter. 

The economies of the plantation increased with its magnitude. 
An overseer was least expensive when his gang was as large as 
he could watch. The planters as they gossiped from year to year 
discussed their problems; whether, perhaps, it was better to 
let the married women return from field to cabin earlier than 
the rest to cook the food and wash the clothes, or to find a few 
intelligent laundresses and cooks and make them specialists. 
A planter who could afford to select and train a negro carpenter 
or blacksmith made larger returns per capita than one who had 
to hire or to use the slave at varying tasks. Simplicity, routine, 
and mental tranquillity were necessary to keep the slave pro- 
ductive. Kind words, a little sugar or molasses with his corn 
meal, tobacco as he wanted it, were parts of the regimen of every 
profitable plantation. The “slave driver”? with whip, profanity 
and abuse, defeated his own ends, and led his employer to bank- 
ruptcy.’ 

But the consequence of owning a successful cotton plantation 
was slavery to the slaves. There was always the need to increase 
acreage and to enlarge the gangs to work it. This was the course 
of highest profit. The free capital accumulated by the planter 
was turned bec into the business as he bought more improved 
land and more slaves. He could not well use uncleared land, 
like the pioneer, because his workmen could not clear it with 
economy. To send a single slave with his axe and grubber into 
the brush was to invite siesta rather than a clearing. Only the 
man who was working for himself was an effective clearer of 
the land. So the planter bought out the farms of his smaller 
neighbors and scoured the country for more slaves, if his own 
did not breed fast enough. His capital had no mobility. In good 
years when it paid to increase the crop both land and slaves rose 
to prohibitive prices. In bad years neither was marketable, yet 


2 J. D. B. DeBow edited from 1846 until the Civil War his DeBow’s Review, in which 
southern economic problems had their day in court. 


204 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


it would have been unsafe to sell the hands for they could not 
have been bought back as needed. The planter looked with a 
good deal of envy at the mill-owner of the North, who could stop 
buying cotton and lay off his hands when times were bad. The 
planter could not avoid turning the profits of good years into 
mere maintenance for bad. 

Nearly everything he used the planter bought. He purchased 
meal and pork for the slaves instead of raising it with little cost. 
He bought his clothing and theirs and all the household equip- 
ment. And as he shipped most of his cotton directly from a 
near-by wharf to England, he tended to open an account with the 
factor who sold his cotton and bought supplies with the proceeds. 
Every year the planter had to have the supplies regardless of the 
price of cotton. His mortgages grew as surplus debts mounted 
against him. Before he died, in many cases, he was working for 
the factor and living in a semi-regal state, in the midst of a little 
court that was built on debt. 

There was still another consequence of the plantation system 
that the slave States had to pay. The cotton planter stripped 
the fertility from his farms. He planted cotton, and only cotton, 
year after year. ‘There was no rotation and no manure from live 
stock to be spread upon the fields. The best cotton soil was so 
fertile that for many years it continued to produce large crops 
in spite of this treatment, but the moment always came when 
the return began to diminish. Nothing in American agriculture 
is less attractive than the plantation going downhill. It meant 
poverty for the planter’s children and dissipation of land and 
slaves. Foreclosures came in their inevitable course, and too 
often what had been flourishing cotton fields relapsed into the 
wilderness. The small, poor, white farmer who could and would 
live upon a few acres that had once been part of a plantation, 
had no surplus of either means or intelligence. The plantation 
era, with its soil destruction, passed over many an area, leaving it 
desolate until to-day.® 

The sharp deviation between North and South became in- 
creasingly apparent after 1815, and in the end produced the con- 
flict over secession. The frontier formed the cutting edge for 
both sections, as its children worked their way towards the 


2 In the first two volumes of John R. Commons, Documentary History of American 
Industrial Society (1910-1911), Professor Phillips has edited documents relating to the fron- 
tier and plantation. 


THE COTTON KINGDOM 205 


unused lands. In the history of the country there are three clear 
phases, both North and South, but leading different directions. 

In the earliest phase, the frontier is the frontier, wherever 
found. Here the typical occupation was that of the home builder; 
the man working out his salvation against the primitive enemies 
of timber, sod, and climate; the woman conducting the home 
and raising children. These were tasks for free men and women 
and for those who expected to grasp the rewards of success. 
Hired labor, or owned, was ineffective even where it could be 
obtained. Life was so relentless that the population was re- 
cruited, generation after generation, from youths who had little 
to start with but their own strength and hope. They owned 
neither slaves nor means. The conditions of equality that nature 
impressed upon their life lasted through the first phase, for 
twenty years or so in northern settlements, and for a somewhat 
_ shorter period in the southern. 

In the second phase, differentiation began. In the northern 
border communities, by the time the first children married and 
moved on, the countryside was settled. The cabins and clearings 
had become farms and homes. The children withdrew to repeat 
the process, but did not prevent the home counties from doubling 
in population, or more, in ten-year terms. Newcomers were 
always taking up the sections of land that had remained unsold, 
in competition with such of the children as preferred to farm 
near home rather than emigrate. The older farmers and the 
more successful were out of debt, and some of them had money 
to lend at ten to twenty per cent a year. The county towns had 
grown, there was a local bank and a group of artisans, and a few 
of the older colonists had moved to town to live near the church 
and seminary, leaving the homestead to be farmed by a son or 
son-in-law. 

In the plantation region the second phase witnessed the entry 
of the cotton planter. Ineffective as a pioneer, the planter allowed 
the free farmer to live through the first phase, as in the North, 
until he had cleared most of his acreage and brought it under 
plough. It took less than twenty years for this, and there de- 
veloped a professional clearing group who made farms to sell. 
The second phase begins with the purchase of several adjacent 
clearings by the planter himself, or some middleman who pro- 
posed to re-sell to a planter. With the entry of the planter, the 
white families who had lived on the farms moved out, and there 


206 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


was a decline in white population not offset in numbers by the 
slaves brought in. The best of the farmhouses was taken over 
by the new owner, or he built himself a mansion. His overseer 
came next. The rest became cabins for the slaves, and if they 
were not conveniently situated they were abandoned, to be re- 
placed by a cluster of negro cabins along a plantation street. Year 
after year, henceforth, the successful planter stripped his land 
with cotton crops. He enlarged his holdings when he could. His 
countryside maintained, not a host of simple, comfortable 
farmers but a few planter magnates, living in remote isolation 
and loneliness. The society of the plantation country was one 
of long distances and heavy journeys for recreation. And when 
the women of the planter’s family had their way, they left the 
plantation for the winter and gathered with their equals in 
Charleston, Savannah, or Paris. Many of them became non- 
residents, and left the property to the exclusive control of hired 
overseers. More would have liked to do so. The period in which 
the North was becoming solvent and self-supporting was one in 
which much of the South was being robbed of its white population 
and despoiled of its fertility. 

The third phase for the plantation region was one of decline. 
The shrewd planter saw it coming and knew that the normal 
consequence of the kind of farming slave labor forced upon him 
was soil exhaustion. If he died too soon, he left his heirs an im- 
poverished estate, heavily in debt and lessening in productivity. 
If he were fortunate, he sold out just before the most profitable 
year was reached and found a northern buyer or a southern heir 
with means who could be captivated by the picture of a huge 
going plantation at the top of its performance. The history of 
the fortunes sunk in decadent plantations would make a long 
and illuminating story. It was rarely that the successful northern 
farmer emigrated again in middle life; but it was common to 
find the southerner of wealth, with gorgeous family and retinue 
of slaves, leaving the old homestead and migrating to a fresh 
plantation bought with part of the profits of the old. He left 
behind a collapsed community, with sparse population and little 
wealth, hardly able to bear its share of the weight of the State he 
abandoned. 

The northern State, in the third phase, doubled again in popu- 
lation and more than doubled in wealth. The last remaining 
tand found an owner. The county towns grew in size and wealth 


THE COTTON KINGDOM 207 


as they supplied the country with luxuries as well as necessities. 
The retired farmers moved to town with money to invest, and 
the last quarter of life found them sitting, conservative but 
solid, as directors of a bank, as merchants wholesale or retail, 
and as owners of budding manufactures that used the local 
water powers. There was wealth and diversification, and both 
were so outstanding that the casual traveler could not fail to 
note that the civilization brought about in fifty years made, out 
of similar elements, entirely different results north and south. 

The deviation in type and interests that is clear enough to-day 
was not apparent before 1815, and in the twenties was producing 
discomforts whose causes were still obscure. The sections were 
conscious of their difference before they knew why they differed. 
Until the date of the Civil War the southern leaders tended to 
attribute the superior population and wealth of the North to 
sectional and protective legislation and to refuse to admit that 
their own inferior labor system and the immobile financial system 
on top of it had stopped their development. When cotton became 
king, the profits that part of the South enjoyed were an obstruc- 
tion to clear thinking upon the slavery question. 

The small amount of cotton that was raised in the United 
States in 1793 was grown in South Carolina and Georgia, chiefly 
in their lowlands along the coast; and these regions controlled 
three quarters of the crop until the War of 1812. The commercial 
supremacy of Charleston and Savannah in the South was un- 
questioned while this state of things lasted. With the shift of 
settlement beyond the Savannah to the waters of the Chatta- 
hoochee and the further streams of Coosa, Tombigbee, Pearl, 
and Yazoo, there came into existence a cotton belt tributary to 
the Gulf, and the southern Atlantic seaboard became nervous 
as to the future. Between 1811 and 1821, as the result of the 
southern drift of settlement, the cotton raised west of Georgia be- 
came nearly a third of the total crop. The eastern crop was greatly 
increasing in absolute amount, but was declining relatively to 
the whole. By 1831 a half of the crop was raised in the West; by 
1834, two thirds. The crop that was worth about thirteen million 
dollars in 1810 was worth over seventy-five million dollars by 1834. 

When the great migration took shape shortly before 1812, 
Mississippi Territory lay directly in the road of its southern 
advance. Erected in 1798, and enlarged after the Georgia cession 
of 1802, it included the whole of the present States of Alabama 


208 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


and Mississippi, north of the thirty-first parallel. The Spanish 
blockade along its southern side, due to the retention of Florida, 
was less important than it would have been if Mississippi had 
been growing rapidly, or if Florida had possessed an active and 
enterprising population. As soon as the territory began to grow, 
the United States acted upon the old claim to West Florida and 
appropriated the shore line west of the Perdido River, adding the 
strip to Mississippi. Mobile was occupied by Wilkinson in 1813, 
though Pensacola, taken a little later, was given back. There were 
under a hundred houses at either Mobile or Natchez when the war 
broke out, and the tide of migration had only just begun to flow. 

The Natchez Trace cut across the western corner of Mississippi 
but was less used as an immigrant route than the Mississippi 
River. From Tennessee and Kentucky the migrants were most 
apt to take a flatboat downstream and make a landing near the 
mouth of the Yazoo River. Here begins a broad strip of deep 
black soil, with few equals in the world for cotton culture. The 
strip, with varying degrees of fertility extends east from the Yazoo 
bottom lands, across southern Mississippi and Alabama. The 
cessions procured by Jackson from the Creek Indians in 1814 
opened a part of the strip to settlement. The Three Notch Road 
passed just south of the strip between Fort Hawkins and Natchez. 

The Three Notch Road was a route of entry for settlers from 
Georgia and South Carolina. When the Northwest obtained 
legislation for the Cumberland Road to the Ohio, a southern 
demand was raised for a similar thoroughfare, and the Falls Line 
was the popular choice for its location. There could be no good 
road much further east, because of the great difficulty of crossing 
the numerous Atlantic rivers. Further west the rising piedmont 
made such a road a great engineering feat. But from falls to falls, 
the road would separate piedmont from coastal plain and would 
touch points at which natural water powers were being developed 
and where towns were springing to life. Richmond, Raleigh, 
Columbia, and Milledgeville, the capitals of their respective 
States, were all near this line, and it was reasonable to ask a 
¥Yederal road that should reach the southern capitals and pro- 
ject itself to the southwest border at New Orleans.‘ 


4 The Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, of which fourteen volumes were 
edited by Professor Franklin Lafayette Riley prior to the accession of Hon. Dunbar Row- 
land, the present editor, are prominent among southern historical collections in both bulk 
and importance. 


THE COTTON KINGDOM 209 


Before the War of 1812, the southern line of settlement stopped 
short of the Ocmulgee River in Georgia, where Benjamin Hawkins 
had resided as southern Indian superintendent since 1796.5 The 
reluctance of the Cherokee and Creek nations to make any 
- cessions stood in the way of fulfilling the southern desire for a 
western road, and the Falls Line never became the site of a 
national thoroughfare. But west of Fort Hawkins a trail was 
blazed that crossed the Chattahoochee River at Fort Mitchell, 
reached the Alabama River at the Hickory Grove, where Mont- 
gomery was built, crossed the Tombigbee somewhat further 
south at St. Stephens, and thence ran close to the thirty-first 
parallel to Natchez. It was sometimes called the Federal Road, 
east of St. Stephens. West of this point it was more often the 
Three Notch Road, named from the surveyor’s blaze. Nowhere 
was it more than an unimproved, though passable, trail, but 
along it came settlers that grew more numerous as the years 
advanced. 

A third route to Mississippi Territory was directly from eastern 
Tennessee, with fertile lands in the bend of the Tennessee River, 
near Huntsville, as objective. The Natchez Trace crossed the 
Tennessee River not far from this region and was of local use. 
Jackson led his army of 1813 in this direction. By act of Congress, 
after the war was over, the men under his command marked a 
Federal road from the vicinity of Nashville, his home town, to 
Madisonville, Louisiana, on Lake Pontchartrain, a distance of 
over five hundred miles. Central Alabama was open to settle- 
ment by 1816, but until after 1830 there were large tracts in 
eastern Alabama and northern Mississippi that the Indians still 
held. 

To these three districts of Mississippi Territory, at Yazoo, 
at Huntsville, and above Mobile, the tide of settlement turned 
in the years in which Indiana and Illinois were being lifted to- 
wards statehood. The population of Mississippi Territory in 
1810 was 40,352 as against the joint population of Indiana and 
Illinois of 36,802. In the next ten years the two northern states 
reached a total of 202,340, while Mississippi and Alabama though 
iess accessible grew to 203,349. In all the States the decade was 
one of crudest pioneer conditions, with few of the residents liv- 
ing in any but the earliest phase of social development. By 1830 
the two northern States had risen to 500,476, while the southern 


5 His letters are in Georgia Historical Society, Collections, vol. Dx. 


210 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


lagged at 446,148; by 1850 the population of Indiana and Illinois 
was 1,839,886; of Alabama and Mississippi 1,378,149. The 
northern States were nearly thirty per cent ahead. 

The division of Mississippi Territory took place in 1817 when 
Congress authorized the western side to form a constitution, 
and created the Territory of Alabama east of an arbitrary line 
running from the mouth of Bear Creek on the Tennessee River 
almost due south to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi con- 
vention was held from July 7 to August 15, 1817, in Lorenzo 
Dow’s old camp meeting house on the Natchez Trace at the first 
station above Natchez. The constitution was framed with the 
usual frontier ease, slavery was recognized as an existing insti- 
tution without debate, and the document after its approval by 
the convention was given an endorsement novel among first 
constitutions. It was submitted to ratification by the voters of 
the State and set a precedent that thereafter was an additional 
measure of the extension of democracy. 

The Territory of Alabama, created in 1817, grew much more 
rapidly than its parent, for more of its land was open to entry, 
and it lay nearer the main bodies of southern population. South 
as well as north, most of the settlers of a new district came from 
nearly adjacent communities. The great migration was nearing 
its crest as Alabama started its independent life, and the small 
farmers who cleared the land were rapidly pushed up into the 
hills or further west, as the planters with money to buy cleared 
land arrived in the lower valleys of the Alabama and Tombigbee. 
In 1819 Alabama was enabled to form a State, and the conven- 
tion sat at Huntsville from July 5 to August 2. Like Mississippi, 
Alabama submitted its constitution to a popular referendum. It 
became a State December 14, 1819. 


CHAPTER XXIV 
MISSOURI: THE NEW SECTIONALISM 


AFTER the admission of Alabama there were twenty-two States 
in the Union, eleven of which permitted and expected to permit 
slavery to exist. The hope or ideal that slavery would one day 
be discarded by the South itself had vanished. Instead there was 
developing a small and wealthy aristocracy that derived its im- 
portance from the exploitation of the cotton crop and the use 
of slaves. Like the bulk of the people of the South and West the 
plantation leaders called themselves Democrats, but they had 
little in common with the Democrats whom the frontier had bred 
until cotton became important, and who continued to be bred 
on the northern frontiers until the industrial aristocracy of the 
iater nineteenth century arose. In the years of the great mi- 
gration, after the entrance of Louisiana into the Union in 1812, 
attention was drawn to the equal balance of slave States and free, 
and the equilibrium in the United States Senate brought about 
thereby. This balance became a political condition to be main- 
tained, and when the next new States appeared to ask the ap- 
proval of Congress, the question was there raised as to the 
nature of the local institutions. The expanding frontier gave the 
background to the slavery controversy. 

After the formation of Alabama, the region available for more 
new States was limited. There were the two detached corners of 
the United States, northeast and southeast. Maine and Florida 
were obviously destined for admission, one in the immediate 
future, the other more remotely. Between the western line of the 
last States (which ran from Toledo, Ohio, around the northern 
and western boundaries of Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, 
Mississippi, and Louisiana) and the new international bounda- 
ries agreed to in 1818 and 1819, lay all the public domain that 
was left. Much of this was already conceded to be uninhabitable. 
North of Louisiana there was reason to suppose that additional 
States could be put in between the Mississippi and the eastern 
edge of the American Desert; certainly Arkansas, which was 
made a territory in 1819, and Missouri, above it. There were also 
two more to come from the Old Northwest, the last of the five, 


212 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Michigan and Wisconsin. If more than these four additional 
States should be built along the border, it would be necessary 
to force the Indians much further west than they were willing 
to go, or to experiment with desert States. “The cultivated 
frontier of the United States, with which the Indians are placed 
in contact,” said a writer in the North American Review in 1827, 
“extends from Detroit to Nachitoches, a distance upon this line 
of fifteen hundred miles.” 

So far as practical men could, or would, see in 1819 there were 
thus six more States to be admitted before the Union should 
reach its full dimensions. Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin 
would be in a latitude unfriendly to slavery. Florida and Ar- 
kansas would maintain slaves, without dispute. Missouri was 
in doubt. For the sake of the balance in the Senate, now becom- 
ing precious, it must be made slave. But the experience of the 
southern-born population in Indiana and Illinois, and its willing- 
ness to give up slavery, made it doubtful whether the southern 
migrants into Missouri could be relied on to. cherish the imstitu- 
tions of the land whence they came, or prevented from recogniz- 
ing the northern fact that slave labor was not a source of profit 
outside the plantation belt. The natural resources of Missouri 
had something to do with the settlement of the question, and the 
preferences of the population had some weight. The necessities 
of a self-conscious section that feared to be overbalanced in the 
Senate was the final deciding factor. 

After a short period of dependence upon Indiana, a separate 
territorial government was set up at St. Louis in 1805. It was 
a government of the first stage, with all of its powers exercised 
by governor and judges who were appointed by the President. 
Its realm was huge, reaching from the Mississippi to the unknown 
western limits of the province of Louisiana, whose name it bore. 
Not until 1812 was it permitted to pass to the second stage, with 
an elected assembly; and then it received the name of Missouri. 
Few of its Indian inhabitants ever knew from contact with it 
that such a government existed, and many of its white residents 
were nearly as free from its control. St. Louis, its capital, was 
center of the fur trade. The shifting traders only occasionally 
returned to the center of the province, and for many years they 
beheld few changes there. There was no considerable Ameri- 
can settlement in Missouri Territory until the great migration. 
Not until after 1815 did St. Louis emerge from the crude shell 


MISSOURI: THE NEW SECTIONALISM 213 


of the frontier outpost and take on the semblance of a town. It 
did not call itself a city until after its incorporation as such in 
1822; but by this later date the rise of steamboat traffic on the 
Ohio and Mississippi had changed the vision of its future. Be- 
tween 1815 and 1822 a new State arose behind it. 

In July, 1819, by an act passed the previous March, Missouri 
Territory was diminished to make room for Arkansas. There had 
been a secondary trading post near the mouth of the Arkansas 
River for a century or more. Arkansas Post was never as im- 
portant as St. Louis, but there was enough traffic up and down 
the Arkansas to give it a precarious existence. There were few 
settlers in this valley when the new territory was created, but 
their distance from St. Louis and the chronic dislike of frontier 
residents for remote government, provided the excuse for slicing 
off a southern strip of Missouri. The parallel of 36° 30’ was made 
the dividing line, except for an irregular tract running south to 
36°, between the Mississippi and the St. Francis River. This left 
in Missouri a group of river colonies around New Madrid that 
were midway between Arkansas Post and St. Louis, but were 
connected by straggling settlements with the northern capital. 
Arkansas Territory extended west between Missouri and Lou- 
islana to the western boundary of the United States, which had 
been fixed a few weeks earlier in the same year at the one hun- 
dredth meridian. The Arkansas border, where it touched upon 
Texas, was the home of southern plains Indians who had never 
admitted white control, and who had ever been a difficult problem 
for Spain, on whose frontier they dwelt. Even before Arkansas 
was named, it had been determined to use part of this region for 
future homes for Indians from Alabama and Mississippi. Fort 
Smith, upon the upper Arkansas River, was erected to protect 
both the natives and the white colonists in the new territory and 
marked a point at which Arkansas was finally divided from the 
Indian country. 

Fort Smith, which was erected in 1817 by Major Stephen H. 
Long and a detachment of the Seventh Infantry, U.S.A., was 
unable to obtain a population of five hundred before 1850. At 
the junction of the Poteau and the Arkansas, and some six 
hundred miles above Arkansas Post, it was a strategic spot, 
rather than a colony. It was the southern station of a chain of 
yosts with which the War Department linked up the northern 
and southern frontiers of the United States after the end of the 


214 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


War of 1812. The other forts in the series were Fort Howard and 
Fort Crawford in Wisconsin, Fort Snelling in Minnesota, Fort 
Armstrong on Rock Island in the Mississippi, and Fort Des 
Moines and Fort Leavenworth on the Iowa-Missouri border. 

The planting of these forts began in 1816, and their location 
had significance as suggesting a permanent border between the 
farmers and the savages. Fort Howard, at Green Bay, was 
built in the summer of 1816, as was Fort Crawford at Prairie 
du Chien. Between them stretched the Fox and Wisconsin 
rivers and a famous thoroughfare that the French had used for 
a century and a half, and the Indians for unknown times. The 
easy portage for canoes, at the bend of the Wisconsin River, was 
slight impediment in the route. The northwest tribes, Sauk and 
Fox, Winnebago, Potawatami, Menominee, Chippewa, and Sioux, 
were all more or less in contact with the little garrisons that were 
maintained in these positions. Fort Armstrong, built at the 
same time, controlled the mouth of the Rock River and was in 
reach of the country identified with the Sauk and Fox. 

West of the Mississippi, the garrisons came a little later. At 
the confluence of the St. Peter’s and Mississippi, where Pike 
held his conference with the Sioux in 1805, was a strategic center 
that was occupied in 1819. This became Fort Snelling, and in 
another generation St. Paul and Minneapolis grew up around it. 
Colonel Henry Leavenworth, with troops from Detroit, began 
the structure, but Major Long had recommended the site, and 
Colonel Josiah Snelling finally completed it. Midway across 
Iowa, Fort Des Moines was established at a later date. In 1827 
Fort Leavenworth, on the Missouri above its great bend, became 
the westernmost of the series. 

A new law to regulate intercourse with the Indians was passed 
in 1816. The foreign traders who had hitherto captured much 
of the fur yield of Louisiana were excluded by this act, and 
licensed American citizens were given a monopoly of it. The 
American Fur Company benefited much by this legislation, and 
its subsidiaries that John Jacob Astor controlled speedily threw 
their agents into the remotest corners of the Louisiana Purchase. 
The British companies, operating out of London and Montreal, 
were brought into violent competition in the narrowed fields, and 
then were combined by act of Parliament in 1821. Their settle- 
ments on the Red River of the North, at Pembina, proved to be 
on the American side of the new international boundary of 1818, 


MISSOURI: THE NEW SECTIONALISM 215 


and they withdrew down the river to the mouth of the Assiniboin, 
founding there Fort Garry, later to ripen into Winnipeg. 

In connection with the erection of frontier forts and a new 
law for Indian trade, the War Department contemplated another 
serious exploration of the western portions of Missouri Territory, 
and designated Major Long as the commander of the expe- 
dition.! It was hoped originally to make this exploration of such 
magnitude as to impress the power of the United States upon 
the minds of all the western savages and to clear up whatever 
geographical matters remained in doubt along the western bound- 
ary of the Louisiana Purchase. Funds were lacking for this, but 
with reduced dimensions the expedition was launched in 1819, 
when in the month of May, Stephen H. Long departed from 
Pittsburgh in his little steamboat, the Western Engineer. 

The river steamboat had passed beyond the experimental 
stage by 1819, and the Pittsburgh shipwrights knew that to 
escape the bars and snags that gave variety to every river trip, 
the boat must be of light draught. The Western Engineer drew 
but nineteen inches, yet had its difficulties before it was far 
upon its journey. It left Pittsburgh on May 5 and started up the 
Missouri about the middle of June. By September it was near 
the mouth of the Platte River, in the vicinity of the Council 
Bluffs, where Long selected a site for his winter quarters, to be 
used during the first winter in the field. He left his men here 
during the winter of 1819-1820, returning to the States; but was 
back again in May, 1820, and ready to start west, up the shallow 
valley of the Platte on June 6. His orders directed him to ascer- 
tain the sources of the Platte, and then move south along the 
mountains to visit the headwaters of the Arkansas and the Red, to 
which Pike had been sent in 1806. He was to impress the Indians, 
and accumulate the scientific basis for an understanding of the 
country. He may have been successful so far as the red men 
were concerned, but his science, like his exploration, failed to 
reach its mark. 

In the summer of 1820, Long made the easy circuit of the 
Platte, the foothills, and the Arkansas. He failed to find a source. 
He saw the great peak that now bears his name, and its southern 
sister, named for Pike, but did not penetrate behind them as 
would have been necessary to determine the origin of either river. 


1This is well described in Cardinal Goodwin, “A Larger View of the Yellowstone 
Expedition, 1819-1820,” in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1917. 


216 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


He did not visit the source of the Red although one of his parties, 
on the homeward leg, made a detour to the Canadian Fork of 
the Red and descended into Fort Smith. 

Long came back to St. Louis with conclusions whose sub- 
stantial untruth was revealed in the century following: “In re- 
gard to this extensive section of country, I do not hesitate in 
giving the opinion, that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, 
and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture 
for their subsistence.” Had he hesitated, he might have foreseen 
the expansion of the United States into Kansas, Nebraska, and 
Oklahoma. But he was convinced that he was right, and he had 
the support of Hugh M. Brackenridge, whose Journal of a Voyage 
up the River Missouri (1816), advised the reader that “compact 
settlements” might be expected along only the six hundred miles 
immediately above the mouth of that stream. “‘Above,” said 
Brackenridge, “‘it becomes more dreary and desert till it reaches 
the Rocky Mountains, and can never have any other inhabitants 
than the few that may exist at certain stations along the river. 
... It combines within its frightful and extensive territory the 
Steppes of Tartary, and the moving sands of the African deserts.” 

The vast region, Long wrote, “commencing near the sources 
of the Sabine, Trinity, Brazos, and Colorado [all in Texas], and 
extending northwardly to the forty-ninth degree of north lat- 
itude...is throughout of a similar character....This region, 
however, viewed as a frontier, may prove of infinite importance 
to the United States, inasmuch as it is calculated to serve as a 
barrier to prevent too great an expansion of our population west- 
ward.” When his observations were printed, the North American 
Review, July, 1821, drew inferences that helped to shape public 
opinion for a generation. It called attention to the fact that the 
“acquired”’ territory of the United States between the Mississippi 
and the Rocky Mountains was “greater than that which belonged 
originally to the rest of the United States....It may be a 
question of political duty [it continued], whether our patriotism 
must expand with the extension of our territory, and require of 
us to look upon our French and Spanish brothers by purchase, to 
be as truly our fellow citizens, as the fathers who defended our 
soil, and the sons who have since tilled it. We...concur in the 
opinion...that there is great difficulty in sending out our 
patriotic affections beyond the Missouri and the Rocky Moun- 
tains. The natural tendency of an increasing empire to separation 


MISSOURI: THE NEW SECTIONALISM 217 


was counterbalanced in the new states we have formed, by their 
being peopled wholly from the older ones, and community of 
language, manners, interest, and ties, thereby preserved. This 
is not the case with part of Louisiana and Florida... .”’ 

Long conceded that the eastern portion of the Missouri Terri- 
tory was habitable and described so much of it as he observed 
along the river banks as he ascended. The census of 1810 had 
found 20,845 inhabitants in the territory; by 1820 the number had 
grown to 66,586 in the reduced Missouri, and 14,273 in Arkansas 
Territory. Most of the white inhabitants in both territories lived 
close to the great rivers. Behind St. Louis the settlements were 
pushing up the Missouri, and Long found the westernmost at 
Franklin, halfway between the mouth of the Kansas and that 
of the Missouri. About 1827 Franklin was washed away by the 
river, but in 1819 it was something over two years old and con- 
tained one hundred and twenty houses. There was here a weekly 
Missourr Intelligencer and Boone’s Lack Advertiser that made its 
bow to the public on April 23, 1819, a few days before Long 
passed by. There were two brick houses among the one hundred 
and twenty, but the only building that had two stories was the 
jail. No church was mentioned, but there were four taverns and 
two billiard rooms. 

Even before Long ascended the Missouri River, or made his 
discouraging report upon the future of the Far West, the people 
around St. Louis had begun to talk of statehood, as others were 
talking in the four other western territories that were admitted 
before 1820.2. The fact that there were under sixty thousand 
inhabitants when the talk began was of no importance, since 
Congress had the power to determine the suitability of the terri- 
tory to become a State. There was no good reason for failing to 
admit Missouri that would not have been equally good if urged 
against Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, or Alabama; and there was 
no disposition to exclude the region. 

There were memorials before Congress, praying for the ad- 
mission of Missouri in 1817-1818, and they were reinforced in 
1818-1819 by formal appeal from the assembly of the territory. 
The measure for the creation of Arkansas Territory that passed 
March 2, 1819, was accompanied by another enabling Missouri 


* Floyd C. Shoemaker, Missourt’s Struggle for Statehood (1916), is detailed, well-informed, 
and judicious. There is a good picture of “Missouri in 1820,’ by Jonas Viles, in Missourt 
Historical Review, 1920. 


218 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


to form a constitution. But the latter was blocked on February 13, 
when a New York representative, Tallmadge by name, offered an 
amendment forbidding the further existence of slavery in Missouri. 
The superior growth of the free States had already given them more 
than half the total population in the United States, and accordingly 
a majority of the members of the House of Representatives. ‘The 
Tallmadge amendment was accepted in the House; the Senate 
struck it out, and Missouri failed to be enabled at this session. 

Between the adjournment of Congress in March, 1819, and 
its reassembling in December, the march of settlers into the 
Missouri Valley continued, and the determination of southern 
congressmen not to permit the exclusion of slavery from Missouri 
grew fixed. The Senate was evenly balanced. Missouri would 
turn it one way or another. And when Maine appeared on the 
program for 1819-1820 demanding admission as a free State, it 
was unthinkable for the South to surrender its hold on Missouri. 
Good observers were reporting that the Missouri settlers were 
bringing with them more slaves than had gone north of the Ohio 
River, and the temper of Missouri itself was in favor of slave labor. 

The District of Maine was not one of the territories of the 
United States, and never had been one. It was instead a detached 
part of Massachusetts and partook of statehood already, having 
its share of representatives in the Massachusetts legislature 
and in the House of Representatives, under the Massachusetts 
apportionment laws. It had long indulged in talk of separate 
statehood and had grown much with the extension of settlement 
after the English war. Its constitutional convention met in 
October, 1819, and framed a document which the people promptly 
ratified. Massachusetts gave her consent to the separation, so 
that Congress had only to declare Maine to be a State. But the 
southern senators were now in earnest about Missouri, and 
Maine was accordingly paired with the former State, and threat- 
ened with exclusion unless Missouri came in slave. 

The great debate in Congress in February, 1820, was the 
first formal display of the new sectionalism brought about by 
the renaissance of slavery. The virtues and defects of slavery 
as a system were brought in question, but more discussion was 
given to the power of Congress to place conditions upon the ad- 
mission of a State, as Tallmadge desired to do, and to the rights 
of slave-holding citizens to a free and full use of the territory 
of the United States. Henry Clay, who was opposed to any re- 


MISSOURI: THE NEW SECTIONALISM 219 


striction upon Missouri, gave his support to the compromise with 
which the deadlock between Senate and House was broken. 
Maine was admitted, by an act of March 3, 1820, effective 
March 15. Missouri was authorized to frame such a constitution 
as she desired, by act of March 6. And it was further provided, 
as a concession to the northern opinion that yielded regarding 
Missouri, that there should be no slavery in the remainder of 
the Louisiana Purchase, north of Arkansas Territory (or the lati- 
tude of 36° 30’ ). There is still some doubt as to who won by this 
compromise. It is certain, however, that slavery could not have 
been forced into any additional territory north or west of Missouri, 
and also that the slave-holder gained a right to enjoy slavery in 
all of the public domain in which it could be made to flourish. 

Missouri remained outside the Union for seventeen months 
longer, not being admitted until August 10, 1821. The reason 
for the unusual delay is to be found in the procedure of the con- 
-stitutional convention that began its sessions June 12, 1820. 
This body gloated too much over the southern victory and 
put into the constitution provisions excluding free negroes from 
Missouri, and restricting the power of the legislature to eman- 
cipate the slaves. The opponents of the compromise were so 
enraged at this that the act to admit Missouri under the new 
constitution could not pass the House of Representatives, and 
the debate over the status of slavery broke out anew in 1821. A 
committee of thirteen, presided over by Clay himself, failed to 
harmonize the conflict; a second grand committee of twenty- 
three brought forth a proviso that nothing in the Missouri 
constitution should ever be construed as denying to a citizen of 
any State any of the privileges and immunities to which he 
might be entitled under the Constitution of the United States; 
and that the Missouri legislature must assent to this. In this 
form the final phase of the Missouri Compromise became a law; 
and in accordance with its provisions Missouri came into the 
Union in August. 

With the admission of Missouri the great migration came to 
an end so far as new States were concerned, and the heavy shift 
of population subsided for another ten years. The United States 
had gained six new States in the process and was now confronted 
with a period of getting used to its new dimensions. The eco- 
nomics of its growth and the politics of its reactions are upper- 
most until 1829. 


CHAPTER XXV 
PUBLIC LAND REFORM 


THE creation of new States along the unsettled border is an 
excellent index to the shifts of population. The fact that six 
such commonwealths were added to the United States in the 
six years beginning with 1816, would of itself establish that 
period as one of marked migration. But even better than the 
States as an index are the figures that show the sales of public 
lands by the United States, for these figures measure not only 
the opening of new settlements, but the extent to which help had 
been found to finance the settlement. 

In the first fifteen years of the public land system, that ey 
minated with the passage of the Harrison Land Act in 1800, the 
total sales from the public domain were 1,484,047 acres. This 
total includes the operations under the three private sales to 
the Ohio Associates, Symmes, and the State of Pennsylvania, 
as well as under the law of 1796. The Harrison Act brought the 
land office to the buyer, opening at the start four local offices 
in the Eastern Division of the Northwest Territory. From year 
to year these offices were closed, shifted, or increased in number, 
in order to follow the business. Before the Harrison Act was 
revised in 1820, there were or had been in operation fourteen 
such offices in Ohio, four in Indiana, three in Illinois, and one 
in Michigan. Outside the Old Northwest, in the same period, 
there were three in Alabama, three in Mississippi, four in Lou- 
isiana, and two in Missouri. 

The distribution of these offices indicates the regions where 
government sales were most numerous; the annual sales reveal 
the flow of occupation. But until after the beginning of the 
War of 1812 the volume of business showed no startling changes. 
Until this date the business of the land sales was managed in a 
bureau of the Treasury Department; on April 25, 1812, this was 
reorganized as a General Land Office, under Edward Tiffin of 
Ohio as Commissioner. After this date the business increased 
rapidly, the figures in millions of acres running as follows: 


PUBLIC LAND REFORM 221 


LORS oo wale teres ehes 14 TS TSO: oO stejerehctare et 2.38 
TERI MASA ae ATS gal he 82 LST OH. Usd oS. 5.11 
LOG Sys iileds oie ape ieleh toe 1.07 LB ZG yGetedtal als eave 1.08 
LSI Gitwatete Hastie leith sets Li, LO Alm shale sexelelehels 78 
LO tae es. eb 1.92 


It is not to be supposed that the figures of sales of public land 
give a complete measure of the new settlement. Much of the 
land thus bought was held by speculators and was not cleared 
or farmed until these owners could find purchasers. There was 
still much land on the market from earlier grants, in which the 
emigrants could buy tracts. There were school lands for sale 
in most of the States. And in Kentucky and Tennessee, where 
there was no public domain, there was an abundance of private 
land for sale. No general study has yet been made to show how 
private land titles originated for any large tract along the frontier. 
The Wisconsin “‘Domesday Book,’? now under way, will show 
it for a single State; but for the present there is no better in- 
dication of the speed with which all lands were being used than 
the fairly accurate figures for the government-owned part of 
it. By 1820, according to Donaldson, the government had sold 
19,399,158 acres; but nearly a third of this was beyond the power 
of the purchaser to pay for, and was eventually turned back 
into the public domain, to be sold again. The defects in the land 
law that Harrison had promoted as a reform were grievous and 
notorious before it had been in operation for ten years. 

The minimum cost of making a farm under the Harrison Act 
cannot have been much different from that of making it on land 
purchased otherwise. This law provided for sale first at public 
auction, and then at private sale at two dollars an acre. The 
better lands were often bid up at the auctions to fancy prices, 
but Donaldson shows that the apparent sales of over nineteen 
million acres were for a total of only forty-seven million dollars. 
After the unpaid-for lands were surrendered, the United States 
received twenty-eight million dollars for thirteen million acres. 
The actual receipts averaged so nearly the minimum of two 
dollars an acre that it is clear that this price was not too low 
for unimproved land on the average frontier. 

Under the Harrison Act the minimum amount sold to one 
buyer was half a section, or three hundred and twenty acres. 
In 1804 this was lessened to the familiar quarter section of one 
hundred and sixty acres, which was quite as much as the ordinary 


222 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


frontier farmer could operate, and more than he could expect. 
to pay for. The government requirement for a quarter of the 
purchase price, or fifty cents an acre, to be paid within forty days 
of the purchase, meant that such a buyer needed eighty dollars 
in cash at the time he made his selection. The theory of the 
credit system, upon which the Harrison Act was based, was that 
payments after the first were to be earned from the produce of 
the land. The second quarter was not due until two years after 
the purchase; the other installments followed a year apart. 

Most of the buyers of western lands were both poor and hope- 
ful. Because they were poor, they found that the initial charge 
of eighty dollars was a large amount of money. Because they 
were hopeful, they were convinced that it would be easy to raise 
the later installments, and accordingly used all the ready money 
they could command in order to make the first payment on as 
large an acreage as they could get. This left many of them 
without cash, and the next two years saw few who were able to 
lay much aside. The number of defaulters at the second, third, 
and fourth payments increased progressively, and in the long 
run nearly a third of the lands contracted for were given up. 
By 1809 Congress began to pass relief acts extending the time 
of settlement for later installments; and in 1820 the twelfth such 
act was passed. 

That the land system was vicious, was apparent by 1809, but 
the full extent of the injury it did has never been made clear. 
Its normal tendency was to create a region in which every citizen 
was in debt to the United States for a period of four years or 
more. The political consequence of such a situation, under a 
system of manhoed suffrage, was an unavoidable tendency of 
public opinion to crystallize against the government. Every 
elector owed money, and voted to determine the policy of the 
government to which he owed it. No right of the government as 
a whole could stand out in his mind as clearly as did his own 
difficulties in making payments. Even if the whole frontier had 
been prosperous, there would have been an incentive to tinker 
with the law to reduce the payments and lighten the load. But 
the frontier was far from prosperous most of the time, and with 
every default on an installment, there was added to the electorate 
another voter in danger of having his farm taken away from him. 
The Harrison Act made it possible to reassert United States title 
to tracts that were not paid for, and the contractor was lable 


PUBLIC LAND REFORM 223 


to lose his equity in the seizure. As the number of defaulters in- 
creased, the pressure increased upon congressmen to bring in 
acts to relieve their constituents. Even worse, as the number of 
defaulters increased because of inability to pay, it was further 
increased by unwillingness to pay. Nothing was actually done 
to dispossess the men who could not pay. The government 
threatened to exercise its right to seize the land, but did not do 
it. The successful farmer, who met his obligation and paid his 
debt when due, saw that the only difference between himself 
and his defaulting neighbor was that he had given up his hard 
earned money and his neighbor had not. He asked himself what 
use it was to pay, when nothing happened to the man who did 
not pay. In many cases, when his next installment came due, he 
let it pass unpaid. The larger the proportion of settlers that was 
in default, the less it was possible for the General Land Office to 
use successful pressure upon any of them. By 1812 the condition 
was one of general scandal, with no remedy except in a modifi- 
cation of the Harrison Act, and the total abolition of the credit 
system. The measurement of the injury done by the system to 
frontier standards of commercial honor would make an interest- 
ing study in group psychology. 

A new view of the public lands was rising in the West between 
1810 and 1820 as the people questioned the success of the old 
land policies. The leaders began to ask by what right the United 
States demanded any payment for its land. They challenged the 
basic idea upon which the public domain had been brought into 
existence. Congress had believed in 1780 that the western lands 
could be made a source of public revenue that would materially 
lessen the financial burdens left hy the Revolution. The pressure 
from the smaller States for the cessions was based upon the 
belief that the lands were a source of wealth. But the experience 
since the United States took up their administration was that 
much money went into them and little came out. There was little 
net revenue, or none. When at first they were sold in compe- 
tition with the lands still available in Pennsylvania and western 
Virginia they could not command either good market or strong 
price; and as these competitions lessened, the government found 
itself able to sell a considerable amount, at a nominal price of 
two dollars an acre, which it could not collect. Land legislation 
was a consistent source of business for Congress, and every 
western representative, as he took his seat, became a new ob- 


224 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


struction in the way of making the public domain a source of 
profit. Towards 1820, the western congressmen began to lay 
stress upon the public services of the men who made new homes 
in the wilderness, and to demand that they be relieved from the 
financial burdens placed upon them. A new senator who took 
his seat from Missouri in 1821, Thomas Hart Benton, made free 
lands his objective; and after thirty years’ service in the Senate, 
he lived to see his idea widely popular and brought to the verge 
of complete triumph. 

So long as tidewater congressmen prevailed in Washington, 
there was no hope of victory for the notion that the United States 
ought to give free farms to the frontiersmen. The eastern desire 
for revenue was mingled with a genuine fear of the growth of 
the western States. There was a willingness to restrict the free 
settlement of the frontier that was more often effective than 
avowed. By 1820 Congress was convinced that the Harrison Act 
had broken down, but was not ready to give up the hope of 
revenue. The particular weakness of the law of 1800 had been 
the relatively large unit of sale, the system of credit, and the 
price. The unit was reduced in 1804, and now was reduced still 
further to half a quarter, or eighty acres. The principle of credit 
was now abolished; and by a new law passed April 24, 1820, 
sales were required to be made for cash. Upon the matter of 
price there was a compromise at $1.25 an acre. The farmers who 
were still in trouble, having defaulted upon installments and 
become lable to dispossession, were given the opportunity to 
make a compromise, and surrender to the United States the pro- 
portion of their lands that they could not pay for. They were 
thus enabled to start free once more. 

The land law of 1820 was passed after the crest of the great 
migration had been reached. The year 1819, in which over five 
million acres of the public lands were sold, was also the year of 
general economic distress and panic. Not until 1834 was there 
another year in which the sales were nearly so great. For a decade 
after 1820 the frontier was assimilating the land it had acquired, 
and there was no strain that indicated special weakness in the 
new land act. In the thirties, when wholesale shift of population 
was resumed once more, the weakness appeared at a different 
spot; this time in the inability of the General Land Office to keep 
its surveys progressing as rapidly as the people demanded. The 
generation that established itself between 1800 and 1820 was 


PUBLIC LAND REFORM 225 


grounded in the belief that a government price for land was one 
of the numerous financial extortions from which it had to suffer. 
It was generally convinced that the newer portions of the country 
were subject to financial exploitation by the older, and was more 
bitterly distressed by the financial bonds that bound it to fellow 
citizens than by those that were held by the lighter hand of 
government. 


CHAPTER XXVI 
FRONTIER FINANCE 


THE need of the frontier citizen for credit was second in im- 
portance only to his need for land. First and most fundamental 
of his problems was ever that of acquiring a good title to the 
land he farmed. The contracts that had to be made in getting 
land left a mark upon the first generation, at least, in any 
frontier. The second need, to get the money to pay for the land, 
began to impress financial traits upon the community; and these 
in the next generation were sometimes more significant than 
even the land economics. Land was one of the occasions for cash 
and credit. But it was only one among a shoal of necessities that 
pressed down upon the young homeseeker and restricted his 
freedom of action until their demands were met.! 

Any analysis of the financial requirements of the typical frontier 
family will reveal the fact that lack of financial opportunity was 
one of the compelling causes of migration; and that with migra- 
tion determined upon, there were important financial necessities 
under at least three heads. The money for the cash payment 
upon the land was one of the three, and second in sequence in 
most cases. In point of time it was preceded by the fund to 
cover the costs of transportation; it was followed by a fund for 
maintenance until the new farm could become self-supporting. 

The typical family on the agricultural frontier was young, 
poor, and ambitious. There were of course exceptions to the rule 
of poverty, but these were not enough to weaken its general 
binding force. Most young people, with either property or easy 
opportunity, were glad not to undertake the risks and hardships 
of the frontier life. Those who had neither were likely to make 
as short a migration as was consistent with finding cheap land 
and desirable living conditions. The exceptions, and numerous 
they were, to this rule, are to be found in colonies like that at 
Marietta or the Connecticut Reserve, or in the individual fam- 
ilies who made the long trip from tidewater to the Ohio Valley. 
New England expanded into the West in some measure, but 


1 Murray S. Wildman, Money Inflation in the United States, A Study in Social Pathology 
(1905), is the clearest presentation of this theme. 


FRONTIER FINANCE 207 


when a census of origin was taken in any of the western regions 
it was commonly found that most of the dwellers in a new com- 
munity originated in the immediately adjacent States, and 
sought their new homes with the minimum of travel.? Yet travel 
they must in any case. Every homeseeker needed means to get 
his wagon and team, to buy his simple outfit for operating the 
home and farm, and to maintain himself and family while on 
the journey. There is enough scattered evidence — it has never 
been assembled — to show that a large proportion of the travelers 
moved on borrowed money, and were unable even to start for 
their new homes until some obliging neighbor or relative took 
their notes and provided them with funds. In individual in- 
stances the amount was so considerable that many who desired 
to move were unable to raise the money for it; in the aggregate, 
the capital so invested became a heavy mortgage upon the future 
production of the new region. 

After raising funds to cover the cost of migration and to make 
the initial payments upon the land, there still remained the 
necessity to support the family until crops could be extracted 
from the reluctant soil. The first harvest can rarely have done 
this, for the number of acres that could be cleared, planted, and 
cultivated in the first season was small. There are many estimates 
that show that the cost of getting a crop into the ground for the 
first time might be twice or thrice what the land itself would 
bring while unimproved. The average family lived in part upon 
the savings of some one else for a year or more. In many in- 
stances the newcomers made the first year partially supporting 
by working for wages for earlier arrivals who could use them on 
the farms. This naturally lessened, by the amount of the wages, 
the debt that otherwise must be incurred. But over the whole 
frontier, taking the average, the home maker continued to go 
into debt for a year or more after his arrival. 

Under these three heads fall most of the debts that the fron- 
tiersman accumulated during the process of establishment. If 
there had been more capital available for loans, every region 
could have been developed more rapidly than it was. But the 
United States as a whole possessed little surplus capital for in- 
vestment. The invasion of European capital had not yet begun 
on a large scale. There were few sums of eastern wealth that 


2 Lois Kimball Mathews [now Rosenberry], The Expansion of New Eagland (1909), still 
needs to be paralleled by other studies as searching and convincing. 


228 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


could be used for western development, no machinery for invest- 
ing it if it had existed, and even less inclination to risk it there. 
‘IT have found no evidence that any eastern capital was invested 
in this way before 1815,” said the late Professor Callender. 
“The settler moved out into the wilderness with his own little 
stock of household goods, farm implements, and cattle. No mer- 
chant with large credit in the East stood ready to advance 
supplies of food and other necessities to him, while he devoted 
his labor to the production of a crop to be sent to market, nor 
was he assisted to clear his land and prepare it for cultivation 
by loans of cash from individuals or mortgage companies.” 
Professor Callender minimized too much the family loans that 
sent many an emigrant upon his way, and gives no recognition 
to the fact that the average distance of the migrant was not many 
miles — that his connections were not those of a westerner with 
the East, but of a frontier farmer with a former frontier com- 
munity, fifty miles or so behind him. But he is right in sug- 
gesting that there were few sources from which the pioneer could 
borrow the funds necessary for the capitalization of his venture, 
even on the most modest scale. 

The development of social institutions provided a new financial 
resource for the pioneer at the moment of the great migration, 
and for two decades banks played a double réle upon the frontier 
stage. Cast as the hero in the first act, ready and able to save the 
heroine from distress, the bank in the second act became the de- 
tected villain on the verge of strangling the confiding victim, 
only to be foiled as the curtain fell by the protective efforts of a 
new wave of fundamental democracy. Each of the parts played 
by the banks was inevitable; together they form a contrast that 
reveals much of the western spirit in its two phases of hopeful- 
ness and despondency. And both prove beyond question the 
high significance of financial institutions in the forming of a new 
society. 

Banks, in the modern sense, are largely the creation of the 
half century that followed the American Revolution. Great 
establishments, like the Bank of England, had long preceded this 
period, but had revealed banking as a detached activity of the 
state; not as an ordinary agent of commerce. The profits of the 
banker, and his special interests, have received more attention 
than the real contribution of banks as such to social finanes. 
It was not that they lent money. Money lenders are so ancient 


FRONTIER FINANCE 229 


that their origin is lost in antiquity, and they have continued to 
exist in every community with no perceptible change until to-day. 
They have been able to lend, however, only what they possessed, 
and the limits of their possible business has been the amount of 
savings that they have accumulated. 

The banking idea added two conditions that together brought 
a fundamental change; these were currency and credit. As to 
currency, it was gradually learned that promissory notes, re- 
deemable in coin on demand, were seized upon by every com- 
munity as a convenient local currency. They were kept so busy 
that until the notes wore to rags they were not sent to the bank 
of issue for redemption. The world was currency-hungry during 
these early years of the industrial revolution and found the paper 
of solvent banks an excellent substitute for specie. The banks of 
issue soon learned of the long interval that would elapse between 
_the issue of a promissory note and the date of its probable presen- 
tation for redemption. They learned that the coin held for re- 
deeming the notes would not be needed, all or soon, and that 
they could extend credit to customers, not only to the amount 
of their coin capital, but to the amount of promissory notes that 
they could keep in circulation. The size of a prudent coin reserve, 
to be held on hand to redeem note issues, was a matter of esti- 
mate that ranged from one third to one fifth; but at whatever 
ratio it was fixed by the operators of the bank, there was a profit- 
able margin of notes above the amount of capital that could be 
safely lent to borrowers. In the use of this margin, the banker 
made his profits, above those of the ordinary money lender, who 
could lend only what he had. For society, the discovery of this 
margin made the existing capital threefold, or fivefold as fluid as 
it would otherwise have been. The capital of a community with 
banks went several times further than the capital of the com- 
munity without banks. Hence their spread. 

Between 1791 and 1811 the United States possessed the Bank 
of the United States with a charter voted by Congress, and a 
small but growing number of local banks whose right to do busi- 
ness was based upon act of legislature in the various States. There 
were always a few informal banks that existed without legal 
sanction but because the men behind them deserved and held the 
confidence of the people to whom they lent their notes. There was 
no “‘free banking” in the sense that any group of men who com- 
plied with the provisions of the law could enter the business. 


930 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Instead each institution was supposed to derive its right to exist. 
by a special act of the law-making body. There were only three 
of these in the United States before the inauguration of George 
Washington; at the end of his century there were only twenty-six. 
In 1811 when the charter of the Bank of the United States ex- 
pired, there were only eighty-eight. The profitable nature of this 
business and the useful social character of their service had been 
found out by this time. The refusal of Congress to recharter its 
own creation opened a period of wholesale extension of private 
facilities that coincides with the great migration, and gives special 
form to its financial obligations and opinions. 

It was natural that the American banks should appear earliest 
tn the eastern towns where financial transactions were largest 
and where there were more men of means to appreciate the ad- 
vantages of pooling their capital in such companies. But shortly 
after the beginning of the new century they made their appear- 
ance in the West. As in the East this function was sometimes 
acquired by indirection. Most famous of the early banking subtle- 
ties was that of the Manhattan Company, chartered in New York 
in 1799 for providing the lower end of Manhattan Island with 
drinking water and for other purposes. It construed its “‘other 
purposes” into a right to operate a bank of issue which has to-day 
become one of the great financial institutions of the United 
States. There appears to have been a Lexington (Kentucky) 
Insurance Company, of 1802, that quietly began to issue notes 
and to do a banking business. The Miami Exporting Company 
of Cincinnati was chartered by the Ohio legislature at its first 
session in 1803, to trade up and down the river with New Orleans; 
but it soon abandoned its first intention and became a bank. 
The profits to be gained by lending at interest the flexible credit 
that a bank of issue could control tempted numerous imitators 
to experiment with the new institutions, and to approach legis- 
latures to solicit charters. 

Between 1803 and 1811, banks appeared in one form or other 
in most of the frontier regions. There was a short-lived one 
chartered in Michigan Territory in 1806, only to be closed by 
refusal of Congress to approve the territorial act. It had mean- 
while flooded the Detroit region with its notes. There was a 
Bank of Kentucky in 1806, and a Nashville Bank chartered the 
following year. This latter, until its suspension during the panic 
of 1819, was among the most famous of the western establishments. 


FRONTIER FINANCE 231 


But there was nothing in western banking until 1811 to indicate 
a “craze” or to suggest more than a reasonable adaptation of 
business to the tendencies of the times. In 1811 the charter of the 
Bank of the United States was refused continuance, it closed its 
doors, and the business it had done became a lure to tempt new 
ventures into the field. 

There was more than the old business of the bank to attract 
new efforts. There disappeared with the bank a sort of control 
that had made every other bank in the United States somewhat 
more reliable than it would otherwise have been. Being the 
largest financial institution in the country it had occasion daily 
to do business with the notes of nearly all the eighty-eight other 
banks that were living independent lives. Each of these was 
under constant pressure from desirous borrowers to increase its 
issues beyond what it could safely redeem, and thus to lower 
its reserve below the danger line. Many of the weaker, or less 
experienced, or less honest did this; and took the chance of failure 
in case any holder of their notes should demand their instant 
redemption. The Bank of the United States was always a large 
holder of these notes, and was in a position at any moment, when 
it distrusted solvency, to test this by sending in for redemption 
of a large amount of its notes. The smaller institutions resented 
this, but could not well avoid it. Their representations, spread 
among their borrowers, that it was the restrictive policy of the 
Bank of the United States that kept them from being as accom- 
modating as they desired, did much to stir up in Congress a dis- 
like for the national bank and to prevent its recharter. With it 
gone, there was not only its business to be struggled for by new 
banks, but there was an assurance of lack of supervision and 
restraint that tempted speculators and crooks into the business. 
A boom struck the United States, under whose influence the 
banks of the United States multiplied to 307 by 1820. In this the 
West had more than its full share. 

Most famous, perhaps, among the new banks created to re- 
place the Bank of the United States was the Bank of ‘Tennessee, 
opened in Knoxville, under the presidency of Hugh L. White, 
with Luke Lea as its cashier. Indicative of the lack of experience 
among its officers is the fact that upon its chartering, White was 
sent east to have its notes engraved, and to learn the “‘forms of 
financiering.” He evidently learned them well, for it was con- 
tinuously solvent until it wound up its affairs in 1827. As years 


232 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


went on it had many competitors with varying degrees of in- 
telligence and honor, but it never lost its grip on either. Ohio, 
in 1816, noted the increase in private banking, and sought to 
regulate and control it by passing a general act under which all 
such institutions should pay tribute to the State. The State 
became a partner in the ventures, and began to accumulate expe- 
rience in the workings of State-owned business. Kentucky, in 
1818, responded to the popular desire for easy credit and created 
a chain of over forty banks with an aggregate capital above eight 
millions. By law it authorized them to pay in their capital and 
to redeem their notes, not in coin, but in the notes of either the 
Second Bank of the United States or the earlier Bank of Kentucky. 

Before 1819, when panic brought on a general reconsideration 
of existing banking, there was a flood of paper money induced 
by the demands of the West for credit.? The restraining influences 
were abolished. The War of 1812 produced a condition in the 
East that forced most of the banks south of New England to 
suspend specie payments. It was the British raid on the Chesa- 
peake in 1814, with the burning of the public buildings of Wash- 
ington, that brought about actual suspension by those that were 
fearful of either runs or seizure of coin by the enemy. When they 
refused to redeem their notes in coin the notes remained in use, 
for there was not much other money, but their value declined. 
The western banks suspended, to keep what coin they had from 
being drawn to the East. And with suspension general, there 
was no possibility that an exigent note holder would bring down 
the structure of speculation in a crash. ‘‘ During this year [1814],” 
wrote a western clergyman, “‘a money mania, like an epidemic, 
seized the people. There were seven banking establishments in 
Jefferson County [Ohio], one of which is said to have been kept 
in a ladies’ chest. But it did not stop here — merchants, tavern 
keepers, butchers, and bakers became bankers.”’ 

The available banking capital of the West nearly doubled 
between 1814 and 1818, and there is no way of determining with 
precision the ratio of issues to capital, or the amount of the 
ostensible capital that was real. In more than one case the sub- 
scribers to the stock of a new bank paid in a small fraction of the 
price of the stock in coin, and received their certificates. They 


3 W. M. Gouge, The Curse of Paper Money (1833), is a quarry from which economic 
historians still hew their facts. It was slightly supplemented by special studies made for the 
Aldrich Monetary Commission. 


FRONTIER FINANCE 233 


then took the stock certificates to the bank, used them as col- 
lateral, to borrow back the coin and with the coin thus received 
paid the rest of the purchase price. The bank thus did business 
with a capital nominally of coin but really of notes of the stock 
subscribers, and was never in a condition to redeem any large 
portion of its notes. 

The elements of strength for society in the new banking in- 
stitutions lay in the provision of a convenient currency and the 
saving involved in making what capital there was several-fold 
more fluid. The dangers were in the inflation of currency that 
resulted, the inexperience and recklessness of the bankers, and 
the erroneous use to which nearly every bank devoted its capital. 
The inflation of currency was certain, with a resulting cheapening 
of the dollar, and a rise in prices. Economists are not agreed as 
to the amount of influence that quantity of money has upon its 
value; but most of them believe that a sudden increase in the 
volume of circulating medium is followed by a rise in prices. 
The sudden turning loose upon society of the extra credit made 
available by the banking circulation brought on such a period of 
inflation. To much of the United States, and to the West in 
particular, this rise in prices seemed one of the evidences of 
prosperity due to the banks, and stimulated the creation of more 
banks, to make more money. 

The bankers of this period were mostly amateurs, who could 
not have had much knowledge of the institutions they were 
guiding because the institutions were so new. They learned their 
lessons as to amount of circulation that was safe, and as to kind 
of loan that was certain, at the expense of their customers; and 
when they made mistakes their customers paid. The business 
was dangerous enough in the hands of honest and careful men. 
But when banks were founded by speculators, or gamblers, or 
with deliberate intent to defraud, their notes were likely to gain 
wide currency before the error was detected, with resulting loss 
to every one who held them. The “‘saddlebag”’ bank appeared 
in many a community, when slick strangers came to town, 
opened an office, lent to patrons the clean, fresh money that had 
bulged their saddlebags on their arrival, disposed of the notes 
they took to local note-shavers, and disappeared by night with 
the loot. It was a common fraud to make notes that nearly re- 
sembled those of a well-known and solvent bank, and to pass 
them on confiding merchants fifty or a hundred miles away. 


234 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Counterfeiting was easy because most of the notes were poorly 
engraved, and could be imitated by any skillful and dishonest 
printer. These were the defects that might have been inherent 
in even a perfect system; but they were present in such propor- 
tions as to endanger the future of the whole principle of banking. 

Worse than either the inflation or the defects due to the in- 
experience or dishonesty of bankers, was the type of loan that 
prevailed. Commercial bankers know to-day that all their 
obligations are demand obligations, payable on sight. So it was 
with the early bankers who lent to the borrower their notes 
redeemable on demand. It is now a commonplace that sight 
obligations may return suddenly for fulfillment, and that the 
harder the times, and the more uncertain the commercial situation, 
the quicker they come. The only safeguard against bankruptcy 
brought about by a sudden run is in an adequate reserve, and a 
set of assets that can be realized in a short time. Best of all the 
assets is commercial paper, running for short periods of thirty, 
sixty, or ninety days. A bank confining its business to loans of 
this type is continually turning over its capital and is ever in a 
position to watch the markets and trend of business and curtail 
or expand its loans according to the financial weather. Unless it 
has a large part of its assets in short-time paper, it is liable to be 
caught in a financial stringency with “‘frozen assets”’ on its hands, 
perhaps entirely good in the long run, but not negotiable in time 
to prevent a run from producing bankruptcy. The eastern banks 
were helped because their customers included the commercial 
institutions that needed short time loans. The western ones 
found among their customers a preponderance of farmers for 
whom a three-months note was worthless. The farmer who bor- 
rowed to cover the costs of transportation, land purchase, and 
maintenance, had no collateral to offer but his land title, and no 
means of repayment until he had completed his purchase from 
the government and earned the money from the land. He needed 
a long time mortgage, for three, five, or seven years. He was 
willing, or could be compelled, to agree to pay a high rate of 
interest; but he must have time. The result was a pressure upon 
the frontier banks to lend on mortgage and tie up their capital 
in slow-moving securities that offered no resource against sudden 
financial storm. The more prosperous the western bank appeared 
to be, in good and certain loans outstanding, the worse it really 
was because of the immense amounts of its notes that were sub- 


FRONTIER FINANCE 235 


ject to presentation for immediate redemption. So tong as the 
war-time period of suspension lasted, the frontier banks financed 
the frontier farms, unknowing or careless of the danger they 
incurred. With the approach of peace, deflation, and specie pay- 
ments, they saw the danger, and their customers felt it. The 
bank ceased to be the agent of easy prosperity, and soon assumed 
the popular appearance of a devouring monster.‘ 

The financial crisis of 1819 marks the transition point between 
the two financial periods, but signs of anti-bank reaction appeared 
earlier than this. The chartering by Congress of a second Bank 
of the United States in 1816, and the efforts of this institution to 
bring about specie payments in 1817 started a new train of 
thought and action. There was no question at Washington but 
that the new bank was needed. After the disappearance of the 
first one, and the outbreak of war, even the Government of the 
United States had difficulty in maintaining solvency. There was 
no one bank on which it could rely. Its revenues were uncertain. 
Its credit was poor. The war loans were raised only in part, and 
even this only because of the heroic contributions of men of large 
private means, John Jacob Astor, Stephen Girard, and David 
Parish. When the war was over, Congress in its reconstruction 
session chartered a new bank, with the United States as a stock- 
holder, and with power to run until 1836. It had the right also 
to open branches throughout the country, as opportunity offered, 
and to do the usual business of issue and discount. 

This new bank, in its first two years, was nearly as reckless as 
the local banks with which it came into competition. It im- 
mediately opened sixteen branches, in addition to the main office 
in Philadelphia. Of these, five were east of Philadelphia and 
eleven were south and west. It never did a full share of business 
in New England. There were six distinctly southern branches, 
at Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Norfolk, Charleston, and 
Savannah; and five western, at Pittsburgh, Chillicothe, Cin- 
cinnati, Lexington, and New Orleans. At all of these, loans were 
made and notes were issued. At one time the specie assets of the 
second bank were less than one ninth of its liabilities. In 1819, 
when the State banks suspended for a second time, the directors 
of the Bank of the United States became aware how greatly it 


4 It required another century for the United States to learn the difference between com- 
mercial and investment banking, and to devise the Federal Reserve Banks (1913), and the 
Federal Farm Loan Banks (1916) to serve the several needs. 


236 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


had over-issued, and installed a new president with a stern com- 
mand to curtail and save the institution. It did this at once, and 
by curtailing its issues increased the number of failures that the 
panic of 1819 had already made too large. It saved itself, but at 
the expense of forcing bankruptcy upon many of the smaller 
banks and weaker merchants, and thereby increasing the wave 
of resentment that was mounting up. The anti-bank movement 
pecame one against all banks, but specially against the Second 
Bank of the United States. The system of branches made it easy 
for local antipathies to merge in common attack upon the one 
symbol of monopolistic national banking. 

Even before it curtailed in 1819, the Bank of the United States 
uncovered hostility to itself and its policies. It forced the local 
concerns to resume specie payments in 1817 by importing gold 
and maintaining them itself. Its refusal to do business with 
suspended banks created heavy pressure upon the latter to re- 
sume. As many of the local banks had yielded to the temptation 
to over-issue, they resumed with difficulty, or not at all. And as 
they made their own curtailments that were necessarily the price 
of resumption, they passed on to the disappointed customers as 
they refused them loans, the antipathy to the second bank. 

The constitution of Indiana, framed in 1816, reveals an early 
phase of the suspicion of the Bank of the United States. It 
adopted two existing territorial banks, at Madison and Vin- 
cennes, as legal; and allowed the legislature to establish a State 
Bank, with one branch for every three counties in the State, but 
provided that other than these “There shall not be established 
or incorporated in this State, any bank or banking company, or 
monied institution for the purpose of issuing bills of credit, or 
bills payable to order or bearer.” This would have prevented, 
had the prohibition possessed constitutional validity, the opening 
in Indiana of any branch of the Bank of the United States. The 
Illinois constitution, framed two years later, contained a similar 
prohibition of “‘banks or monied institutions” except those 
chartered by the State. The southern States, Alabama and 
Mississippi, and Missouri, that made constitutions during the 
great migration, provided for the creation of State banks, but 
omitted the prohibition against the existence of any others. 

The coercive power of the Bank of the United States, that 
roused resentment against the first, roused it against the second. 
What Indiana and Illinois wrote into their constitutions, Ohio, 


FRONTIER FINANCE 237 


Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia 
wrote into their statutes between 1816 and 1819. The common 
statutory way of excluding the branches of the Bank of the 
United States was to impose heavy taxes upon branches of 
“foreign”? banks — $15,000 a year in Maryland, $50,000 in Ohio 
and Tennessee, and $60,000 in Kentucky. Before long the new 
bank was forced to decide how it should treat this attempt at 
prohibition. Its reluctance to submit brought the matter before 
the Supreme Court of the United States, and gave John Marshall 
the occasion to hand down the definitive decision in the cases of 
McCulloch vs. Maryland, and Osborn vs. United States Bank. 

It was the need of the public domain for a policy of govern- 
ment that forced Congress in 1787 to take the first steps in assert- 
ing a national authority. From the frontier now, in the resistance 
against the power of this national authority to charter a national 
bank, came the stimulus to assert and define the nature of that 
power. It was not the East or the older sections that gave the 
most incentive to declare the meaning of the United States, but 
the frontier with its clear and uniform interests, and its institu- 
tions in formative stage. John Marshall seized the occasion 
arising in this controversy to assert the superiority of the Federal 
Government for all time. “Let the end [of Federal legislation] be 
legitimate,” he wrote, “let it be within the scope of the con- 
stitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly 
adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with 
the letter and the spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.” 
Upon this argument rests the whole doctrine of implied powers, 
without which the United States Government would have been 
incompetent to meet the changing conditions brought about by 
the revolutions in life since 1787. To it may be attributed the 
steadiness with which the American Constitution has weathered 
the generations and watched. with tranquillity the upheavals 
that have upset the rest of the world. The conclusion reached by 
Marshall was inherent in the Constitution, and would doubtless 
have been reached eventually by another, under a different pro- 
vocation; but to the historian there is much significance in that 
the immediate provocation for the doctrine was the frontier 
experience with the new institutions of finance.® 


§ Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (1923), has done much to 
remove the Supreme Court from the level of partisanship, and to set it in a reliable matrix 
of historical facts. Albert J. Beveridge, Life of John Marshall (1919), is a distinguished 
monument to both author and subject. 


238 =HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Under the decision in the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland the 
States were denied the power to interfere in any way with the 
Bank of the United States, and it proceeded to extend its branches 
as it pleased. As the years elapsed after the depression of 1819, 
and as the debtors of that year became solvent again, the anti- 
pathies to the second bank dropped beneath the surface of opinion, 
until a casual observer might have believed that they had van- 
ished. But the distrust for banks continued, and was shown in 
local struggles for relief in the years immediately following the 
panic. 

Down to 1819 the western States generally encouraged the 
creation of local banks, and issued charters to them readily, under 
the belief that they made credit obtainable and were of general 
use. The result was a blanket of mortgage indebtedness over the 
region of new development, and a system of banks unable to 
meet financial stress. When hard times came, and the banks 
found it necessary to raise funds to meet their notes, they had 
only two options: — to require debtors as the debts came due 
to pay in cash; and to make new loans in smaller amounts than 
were needed by the borrowers. The result was general bank- 
ruptecy. The mortgagor was rarely able to raise the money to pay 
off the principal of his loan; often he could not even meet the high 
interest charges. When he became delinquent, the bank that 
owned the mortgage had to decide whether it was wise to fore- 
close and try to collect what was coming to it by legal process. 
If it failed to foreclose it drifted into trouble itself with worthless 
assets. If it foreclosed it made an enemy and terrified every 
debtor who feared similar treatment. 

The uniformity of the burden of debt on the frontier made 
foreclosure there a more unpopular thing than it is in a mixed 
community where debtor and creditor rub elbows at every turn. 
At best it is an unlovely act to turn a debtor out of his property, 
and by forcing a sale compel him to risk and perhaps lose his 
equity. But in a mixed community there is a buyer at every 
sale, and the transaction speedily becomes fait accompli. On the 
frontier, however, with all the neighbors fearing similar treat- 
ment, foreclosure became not a regrettable necessity, but an act 
of malignity. The bank was blamed for an impossible interest 
rate, and for wanting its money. The buyer was criticized as a 
bloodless speculator, little better than a thief because he bought 
at forced and non-competitive sales, and acquired the former 


FRONTIER FINANCE 239 


owner’s equity for nothing. The bank that felt impelled to fore- 
close, needed to inquire whether it could find a purchaser brave 
enough to incur local hostility. Like-endangered neighbors often 
attended the foreclosure sales and by menace discouraged bidding. 
If no buyer could be found, the bank could not gain anything 
but odium by attempted foreclosure. The temper of the frontier 
made debt collection hard. 

When the panic broke in 1819 there was the burden of heavy 
and uniform debt covering the new States and many regions of 
their elders. Often the farmer had no equity at all because in the 
enthusiasm of settlement he and the bank had marked his pro- 
perty far above its real value, and he owed on it more than its 
whole worth. Few frontier banks could adhere to the good rule 
of a fifty per cent mortgage on a conservative valuation. As 
money became scarce because of the curtailment, the western 
legislatures sought to ward off depression. Tennessee launched 
another Bank of Tennessee, and Kentucky incorporated the 
Bank of the Commonwealth. Each of these, in substance, lent 
the credit of the State to citizens. 

The Kentucky attempt to fight panic with law deserved, and 
has received, much attention from historians. The Bank of the 
Commonwealth was intended to be a machine for note issue, and 
was relieved by law from the requirement to redeem its notes. 
Its loans were apportioned among the counties, and were meant 
to be granted to persons who could not borrow anywhere else. 
At the same time, in 1820 and 1821, Kentucky passed laws 
staying the legal action for collecting debts and placing obstacles 
in the road of foreclosure. The creditor who would not accept 
the notes of the Bank of the Commonwealth was required to 
postpone the forcible cellection of his debt; foreclosed debtors 
were given a long period in which they could redeem their pro- 
erty; sales of land by execution were forbidden unless the property 
brought three quarters of an appraised value fixed by the neigh- 
bors — and these could be trusted to make the appraisals high 
enough. Public opinion fell away from the creditor who sought 
to protect his rights, as it had already fallen away from the 
United States when the General Land Office wanted to collect 
the installments due upon land purchases. The debtor com- 
munity persuaded itself that it had been so badly treated that 
default was honorable. In Kentucky the legislature fairly repre- 
sented the opinion of its constituents. 


240 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


The Kentucky relief laws were forced to run the gauntlet of 
the courts, and in 1823 the highest court of the State declared 
them to be unconstitutional. The judges who handed down this 
decision were not greeted as courageous defenders of justice 
against passion, but were denounced as the friends of privilege. 
The State campaign of 1824 was fought over the issue of the 
decision, and the people won. The next legislature, finding it 
impossible to change the decision, repealed the judiciary act, 
and legislated the offending judges out of legal existence. It cre- 
ated a New Court, more accommodating to public opinion. But 
the Old Court refused to be abolished, kept up an extra-legal 
existence, and became the rallying point for the more conservative 
and the more far-sighted members of the State. As the years 
went on, the worst effects of the panic were outlived, and solvent 
farmers, with money coming to them, saw little good in pre- 
venting the collection of just debts. By 1826 the Old Court 
party carried the State, and its next legislature repealed the New 
Court law over the veto of the governor. Financial solvency had 
won in the long run, but its victory left permanent scars. 

The West that was taking shape between 1819 and 1829 never 
entirely forgot its antipathy to banks, and its fear of financial 
institutions. It lost them for short periods, but the emotion was 
always potent in shaping western opinion, breeding a fear of 
privilege, and reinforcing the ideas of democracy that Jefferson 
had found so strong. Neither while the bank war was raging, 
nor after it subsided, can one understand the frontier States 
without taking this experience into full account.® 


6 William Graham Sumner, Andrew Jackson as a Public Man (1882), Contains a pungent 
and faithful account of the relief system. 


CHAPTER XXVII 
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM 


WHEN Congress assembled in the late autumn of 1815 to take up 
the various measures of reconstruction for the United States, there 
began a generation that was to be dominated by four great 
Americans, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, 
and Henry Clay. The age of the American Revolution was over, 
though John Adams and Thomas Jefferson lingered on in retire- 
ment for another decade. The period of tide-water ascendency 
was nearing its end — an end that had been foreshadowed when 
the western “war hawks” took possession of Congress in 1811 and 
forced a war upon James Madison. In the next thirty-five years, 
for Calhoun, Webster, and Clay were still on the stage in 1850, 
and the indomitable spirit of Andrew Jackson still inspired the 
majorities of the Mississippi Valley, the United States made its 
great strides towards nationality. And at nearly every step it 
took, the decision was made upon some point presented out of the 
experience or upon the insistence of the region commonly called 
the West. Part of this West was in the primitive stage of the new 
frontier, part had recently passed beyond it. The margin of occu- 
pation of the continent was relentlessly moving on, and the spirit 
that accompanied it remained a living force. 

Clay and Calhoun came to the task of reconstruction as young 


and enthusiastic nationalists, as the word could be used in 1815. 
_ They had seen lessons in the experience of the United States in the 








war just closed, and sought to take advantage of them. Webster 


had not yet found his place, and was still the local politician, 


inspired chiefly by a vision of the interests of his section, that had 
opposed the war and fought the Democratic politicians who con- 
ducted it. Jackson was still in the regular army, a military hero 
after New Orleans, but not identified with any political theories. 

In the legislation of 1815-1816, Clay as Speaker of the House of 


_ Representatives, and Calhoun, from the floor, joined in support 
of the new measures; a bank to straighten out the national 


finances, a protective tariff to provide revenue and safeguard the 


- young manufactures to which the war had given birth, and the 


first step in a system of internal improvements that should make 


2942 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the United States more prosperous and more mobile in another 
struggle. Congress agreed with them in these measures, discussing 
each more from the standpoint of expediency and detail than from 
that of politics or theory. The bank and the tariff were enacted in 
1816. The following winter a bill for internal improvements was 
sent to President Madison in the last weeks of his administration. 

The bank act of 1816,! provided that the Bank of the United 
States should pay over to the National Treasury about half a 
million dollars a year, as the price of its franchise and as interest 
on the Government-owned stock. This bonus, as it was called, 
was not pledged to any special purpose; and the Bonus Bill was 
brought forward directing that it should be spent year after year 
upon internal improvements of national character. President 
Madison was himself convinced that the building of roads and 
other means for internal communication was necessary and had in 
his last two annual messages advised Congress to use what powers 
it possessed and to take steps to enlarge them by constitutional 
amendment. When, however, he received the Bonus Bill, he could 
not square it with his understanding of the Constitution, and 
returned it with his veto. 

In the New England States, where internal improvements were 
disliked as another of the western schemes, and in the South, 
where a distrust of the exercise of Federal power was rapidly rising, 
the veto of the Bonus Bill was welcomed. Madison knew his Con- 
stitution. No member of the convention that framed it had been 
more methodical than he. His private notes enabled him to recall 
nearly every debate of consequence that took place during the 
summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. He now urged Congress to obtain 
by amendment the powers that he thought it lacked, but was con- 
strained to veto the act in question because general internal im- 
provements did not fall among the enumerated powers of the Con- 
stitution. Marshall had not yet thought out his decision in 
McCulloch vs. Maryland, and Madison’s train of thought was 
similar to that of the elder statesmen of the out going generation. 

The day after the veto of the Bonus Bill, James Madison left 
office, and James Monroe, next of the Virginia hierarchy, took his 
place. The new President agreed with the constitutional doctrines 
of his predecessor, and found that the veto forced him to a decision 


1 No historian has yet treated the tariff or internal improvements with adequate learning 
and dispassion; for the bank, however, all reasonable needs are met by Ralph C. H. Catter- 
all, Second Bank of the United States (1903). 


THE AMERICAN SYSTEM 243 


as to practical steps. The United States was, and had been since 
1802, pledged to a road between the Potomac and the Ohio rivers. 
Since the close of the war this great turnpike had been built as 
rapidly as the contractors could work. It was now nearly finished 
and was drawing upon money in the Treasury as the bills came in. 
A strict adherence to the view of Madison’s veto would compel an 
abandonment of the Cumberland Road and would prevent the 
undertaking of further ventures. In the various enabling acts 
passed for the new States, Congress was pledged to devote a part 
of the proceeds from land sales to road building; this now had to 
be reconsidered. If the policy was unconstitutional it must be 
stopped. 

Monroe allowed the Cumberland Road, which was nearly done, 
to be completed; and it was opened throughout in 1818. But he 
applied the new policy to new improvements as they appeared, 
and discouraged the hope of the Middle States and the West that 
the United States would give them generous aid. The New Eng- 
land States, and the South, were so close to navigable waters that 
internal improvements never meant so much to them as to the 
West. It was the western demand that precipitated the debate 
over internal improvements and that stimulated a political move- 
ment to break down the obstruction of the President and his 
school. } 

The resistance of Monroe was required to show the western 
States how keenly they needed and desired the improvement of 
their roads. As their plans were blocked they came to realize that 
transportation was the price of their solvency and prosperity, and 
stood third at least among their basic problems. First was the 
satisfaction of their land hunger; next came the devices to which 
they resorted to raise what money they needed. But with only 
land and debts there was no hope ahead. Since all the western 
population expected to live by farming, there could be no local 
market for much of the agricultural produce that their farms 
yielded. Every farmer had, in a year or two after settlement, a 
rough abundance on his own table and in his own barns. But the 
only way he had to raise his interest and meet the installments on 
his principal was through the sale of his agricultural surplus. 
Grain, flour, whiskey, and pork he could produce in quantity, if he 
could only sell them. An early realization of this caused the west- 
ern determination to control the navigation of the Mississippi 

River. As settlements pushed up into the country, away from the 


244 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


great rivers, the lack of roads was felt. There were no local means 
to build them. Reliance upon a general Federal Government was 
the only hope; and this was now chilled by the narrow vision of 
Madison and Monroe. From the moment of the veto of the Bonus 
Bill, the leaders of the West saw that their prosperity was tied up 
with the success of internal improvements. They did not have to 
be taught that these were needful; they had rather to learn how to 
make friends, and how to state their demands so as to procure 
results from Congress. Few leaders failed to try to break this 
barrier. The most successful at the task was Henry Clay, with his 
American System. 

In order to procure congressional support for roads between the 
sections, two things were needful. One was to impress or convince 
the President, the other to get the votes in Congress. There were 
not enough votes in the West alone to bring success. By union 
with the Middle States the Bonus Bill majority was obtained; but 
this majority was too weak to pass the bill over the veto, and 
might not be counted on to continue in the face of persistent oppo- 
sition from the President. If either the East or South could be 
persuaded that internal improvements were to its interest, the 
votes thus gained when added to those of the West, would make a 
safe majority. The most promising strategy was to approach the 
East, for this section had emerged from war conditions, ripe for 
local demands upon Congress and needing to make friends on its 
own account. 

The situation uncovered during the debate over the Tariff of 
1816 revealed the way in which the East could be approached. 
The new manufactures, chiefly in New England, were the creation 
of the war, and faced destruction after the return of peace. There 
was no serious difference of opinion in Congress that the existing 
industries ought to be protected enough to stay alive; the possi- 
bility of a general system of protective tariffs began to arouse 
eastern interest. 

Until the beginning of the economic warfare in 1807, the United 
States was In an industrial way nearly as much a colony of Eng- 
land as the States had been before 1783. At the earlier date, ex- 
cept for the domestic manufactures that kept every rural house- 
wife busy, the Americans either bought their finished products 
from European makers or did without them. The absence of 
available capital, and the immaturity of factory manufacture 
kept the United States backward and retarded the rise of a real 


ad 





THE AMERICAN SYSTEM 245 


industrial population. Eastern fortunes went into shipping or 
trade, not into manufacture. But with the embargo and the cur- 
tailment of the stream of goods from Europe, the prices of store 
goods rose, the supply lessened, and one by one, men were tempted 
to try to make in America for the American market. There were 
sets of plans of the new spinning and weaving machines that were 
smuggled to the United States before 1800. Samuel Slater began 
to operate the cotton factories of New England by 1790. But 
because of the high cost of American labor and its inexpertness 
there were few profits in the industry. At a normal competitive 
price the English mills could easily undersell those of the United 
States. 

Between 1807 and 1815 the new American factories were 
launched, the cotton mills of Francis Cabot Lowell at Waltham 
being among the most important. Their rise gave a nervous shock 
to the European manufacturers who had hitherto had a safe 
monopoly of American trade; and before the news of the signing 
of the Treaty of Ghent reached America, there were British ships 
hovering off-shore with cargoes of British goods for the American 
market. The goods were sold at prices designed to drive the 
American competitors out of business and might have succeeded 
in the attempt had not Congress cheerfully responded to the 
manufacturers’ plea for help by passing the Tariff of 1816. 

With American manufactures once established and the principle 
of protection conceded, the debate was on. Matthew Carey, of 
Philadelphia, took the lead in popularizing the arguments for a 
protective tariff and attacking the free trade philosophy of Adam 
Smith. Hezekiah Niles, a Baltimore printer, who brought out the 
first issue of his Weekly Register in 1811, was an easy convert to 
the new thought, and used his columns to give it circulation. The 
individual manufacturers supported the debate from self-interest; 
and the communities into which they brought employment be- 


- came interested in their success. It took ten years or more to bring 
New England to a general acceptance of the ideas of protection. 


The Middle States and West did not have to be converted, having 
no repugnance to the Federal Government to overcome and ap- 
proving the ideas from the start. Before the agitation was far 


_ advanced the connection between the tariff and internal improve- 
ments was seen, and Henry Clay came to the front as its ex- 
_ pounder. 


The position of Henry Clay as Speaker after 1815 made his 


246 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


support necessary for any promoter of a new legislative policy. 
The failure of Monroe to invite him to become Secretary of State 
in 1817, made him willing to lead in criticism of administration 
policies and in espousal of new ones that were likely to embarrass 
it. His position as the most important statesman that the West 
had produced kept him in touch with western needs and aspira- 
tions, and ambitious to be their champion. At nearly every session 
of Congress after 1816 he listened to new demands for protection; 
for higher rates on established industries, and additional rates for 
new ones. He came to see what the more theoretical advocates of 
protection were urging. By 1824, when the tariff revision of that 
year was under way, he had become the most important political 
leader of both internal improvements and tariff and was able to 
bring the two policies into a real unity of national significance. 
The speech of Clay on March 30, 1824, urging the American 
System upon the country, has come to be a classic, and few pro- 
tectionist orators since that date have added anything to it. He 
began with a gesture to secure the adhesion of the West. The 
West was prostrate, he said. He described the panic of 1819, the 
overproduction without a market, the dangers of foreclosure. He 
knew that the approaching campaign in his own State was to be 
fought upon the issue of the courts and their relation to debt col- 
lection. He pointed out the paradox of bankruptcy, existing and 
menacing, in a land of opportunity and plenty. He asked why the 
distress; and answered himself by asserting that “during almost 
the whole existence of this government, we have shaped our in- 
dustry, our navigation, and our commerce, in reference to an ex-’* 
traordinary war in Europe, and to foreign markets, which no 
Jonger exist.’’ Peace in Europe, he pointed out, was followed by a 
cessation of imports of food from the United States, for Europe 
in time of peace could and would feed herself. It was hopeless, he 
believed, to look to the European market for a remedy for Ameri- 
can depression. Europe could not possibly consume the American 
surplus, for American population was doubling every twenty-five 
years, and production of food was ever increasing its excess over 
consumption. Europe would not take the American surplus, if it 
could, for every European country properly desired to develop its 
own agriculture and to exclude American competition in foods. 
The only way that Clay could see to relieve the situation was to 
build up the American market. If this could be done, it would 
provide a steadier and more reliable market than Europe could 


THE AMERICAN SYSTEM 247 


afford, and would have the added advantage of making the United 
States independent of European fluctuations and upheavals. 
Clay might with propriety have referred at this point to Monroe’s 
memorable message of the previous December, in which the Presi- 
dent laid down for all time the doctrine of a set of American inter- 
ests separate from those of the Old World. He was advocating an 
American economic system to parallel the political one of Monroe; 
and praised his system under the name American, in contrast with 
the non-American system that made American prosperity de- 
pendent upon world markets. 

The virtue of a protective tariff was that it would at one stroke 
increase the degree of American independence in an economic 
sense, and improve the home market for food stuffs. Every new 
factory would by its output lessen the necessity to import foreign 
goods. It would moreover occupy in its shops men and women 
who would otherwise have been engaged upon the farms in raising 
food. They would continue to consume, making a market for the 
surplus, but they would cease to produce food, and so would reduce 
competition. The West could support a policy of voting protection 
to factories in the East, because thereby an eastern consuming 
population would be built up. It was even possible that some 
manufactures would cross the mountains, and take root in the 
towns of the Ohio Valley, thus bringing new home markets directly 
to the farms. The tarit¥ system would reduce the proportion of agri- 
cultural workers, increase the demand for food, and perform the 
patriotic service of making the United States really independent. 

In his other speeches, Clay elaborated the idea of internal im- 
provements in connection with the tariff. By means of a proper 
system of these new highways, the farms and the markets would 
be brought together. Freights would be lessened, and by that 
amount would widen the radius within which the western farmer 
might hope to find a buyer. East and West were asked to support 
the new system, and Clay may well have had a vision of himself as 
building up the first constructive program of national develop- 
ment since that of Alexander Hamilton. 

The difficulty that stood in the way of Clay’s success as a legis- 
lative leader was the conscientious obstruction that Monroe 
offered to internal improvements. In the years immediately after 
1817, Monroe saw no reason to change his conviction that the 
Bonus Bill veto represented a sound view of the Constitution. 
The Cumberland Road was completed and put to use. Over its 


948 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


course flowed that part of the great migration that moved from 
points east of the Susquehanna to the Ohio River. The eastern 
sections of the road were crowded with wagons before the western 
were done. Like any stone road, it began to deteriorate at once, 
and every season saw a larger number of holes and ruts that needed 
repairs, but got none. There was no provision in the law for keep- 
ing the road in good condition, and no precedent for the United 
States to manage and operate such a public work. 

Five years after the veto of the Bonus Bill, Monroe, “with deep 
regret,” vetoed “An act for the preservation and repair of the 
Cumberland Road.”’ It was proposed in the bill to open toll gates, 
charge tolls of the users of the road, and devote the proceeds to 
maintaining the road in usable condition. This seemed to Monroe 
to imply “‘a power to adopt and execute a complete system of 
internal improvement”; a power which Clay believed to exist, 
and which was readily to be inferred from Marshall’s recent de- 
cisions; but which Monroe denied. The President sent with his 
veto message an elaborate statement of his. views upon constitu- 
tional powers and internal improvements, that may be regarded 
as the classic presentation of the views of the opposition. It was 
also one of the last presentations of the view, for in two years more 
Monroe found a way to reconcile his scruples with the attainment 
of the works. ‘The complete leadership of Clay in presenting the 
proposals for internal improvements was reached during the tariff 
debate of 1824. It had been growing ever since 1817. The West 
had become a unit in accepting it; the eastern States were more 
approving every year. ‘The pressure for new works, and the 
reasonableness of keeping up what had been done, did not miss the 
attention of the President. 

A month after Clay’s great argument for the Tariff of 1824, 
Monroe signed a bill authorizing the War Department to under- 
take a wholesale program of surveys of routes suitable for improve- 
ment. There was nothing in the Constitution that had not been 
there in 1817, but Monroe now convinced himself that the power 
to maintain an army and to establish military and post roads war- 
ranted the undertaking. His effective resistance to the western de- 
mand came to anend. On the last day of his presidency he signed 
a pill for surveying and marking a western road from the borders 
of Missouri to the Mexican frontier, in the direction of Santa Fé. 

As the years roiled on, from 1815 to 1824, and Clay became the 
western exponent of the American System, no one could miss the 


THE AMERICAN SYSTEM 249 


political values in a western leader, with a western program, gain- 
ing the adherence of the eastern States. Clay, of course, wanted 
to be President, and his friends worked for him between 1820 and 
1824. It was not worth while for any one to oppose Monroe in 
1820, for there was no clarified issue, and no other leader with a 
standing more than local. The so-called era of good feeling was 
not one of unanimity, but one of unripened interests and un- 
seasoned leaders. After 1820, however, the field was open to all 
aspirants, and every section produced at least one candidate. 
John Quincy Adams, from New England, had the advantage of 
the long tradition by which a Secretary of State acceded to the 
presidency, as well as his descent from a former President. Wil- 
liam H. Crawford of Georgia was the southern candidate, with a 
strong following in Congress. Clay was, of course, brought for- 
ward as chief exponent of the American System — the only candi- 
date who stood for a definite policy of government. And Andrew 
Jackson, of Tennessee, was produced as well, to represent a differ- 
ent phase of the opinion of the West. 

Clay had succeeded in carrying with him on the tariff the middle 
tier of States — Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, 
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, as well as New York, Connecticut, 
Rhode Island, and Vermont. The believers in his American Sys- 
tem had the votes to elect him President if they would. But when 
the election came in 1824, John Quincy Adams carried away from 
Clay, New York and all of the New England States, though not 
differing from Clay in principle. And Andrew Jackson, whose 
views on public affairs were matters of profound uncertainty, 
carried the popular vote of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, 
and Illinois. There was no election. Clay ran fourth of the eandi- 
dates, and hence could not have his name appear before the House 
of Representatives whose duty it now was to elect a President. 
He presided over it as Speaker, and watched the contest between 
the two men, Jackson and Adams, who had cut into his field, and 
Crawford, whose strength was in the South which had been cold 
to the American System from the start. He threw his influence to 
the one who openly accepted his principles, and Adams was 
elected. When Adams responded by choosing him as Secretary of 
State, it may well be said that the American System of the West 
had triumphed, although its greatest prophet held the lesser post. 
After the approval of the Road Survey Bill of 1824, the United 
States possessed an administration pledged to the doctrine of 
internal improvements, and all that this implied. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 
JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 


THE victory of Clay’s system, together with the defeat of Clay, 
calls for careful examination.! The election maps show that in 
many States citizens who approved Clay’s principles and who held 
the admiration of Clay that was general throughout the West, 
nevertheless were carried away by personal enthusiasm for an- 
other. They voted for Jackson, who received more votes than any 
other candidate. Yet Jackson in 1824 was only a military hero, 
and did not make clear his attitude upon the real issues in govern- 
ment until after his inauguration in 1829. The best general ex- 
planation of the paradox is that Clay represented the West truly, 
but Jackson more vitally; that the truths for which Clay stood 
were less compelling than those that were exemplified by his rival; 
that the intellectual and constructive program articulated in the 
American System was at a disadvantage as a procurer of votes 
compared with Andrew Jackson’s personification of frontier de- 
mocracy. 

In the dark years that followed the boom period of the great 
migration, between 1819 and 1825, the West, like the whole 
United States, was crying for a leader who could sense its needs 
and translate them into phrases that every voter could under- 
stand. There was an economic situation that called for correction, 
if it was possible by conscious thought to correct the economic 
environment. There was the burden of debt that lay heavily upon 
the shoulders of the typical border citizen, and by its sheer weight 
perverted his judgments. There was the need of a market for 
the farmer’s surplus. There were, too, the rough plenty of a gen- 
erous land, and the universal chagrin that the opportunity so 
clearly visible was yet so elusive. Clay saw these elements, and 
constructed his system to meet as many of them as possible; and 
found few among his western countrymen who contradicted his 
diagnosis. Yet he failed to receive the full rewards, because there 
were additional common qualities of the West, capable of being 


1 The best analysis of sectionalism in the third decade of the last century is Frederick J. 
Turner, Rise of the New West (1906); his Frontier in American History (1920) is a useful 
collection of his various essays upon different aspects of this general theme. 


JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 251 


stimulated into powerful political incentives and producing re- 
actions that reached the heart as well as the brain. Clay’s program 
was of the intellect, but the West was more keenly conscious of its 
heart. 

In analyzing the psychology of the West, it must never be lost 
sight of that the persistent fight with nature made of the pioneer 
an individual with sharply developed peculiarities. It is a nice 
question whether the equalitarian or the individualizing forces 
were the weightier. The one condition that the pioneer could not 
get away from was the oppressive similarity of his life with that of 
his neighbors. He had a tendency to suffer from whatever affected 
them; and when by chance he escaped the epidemics of thought or 
condition that swept the West, his instinct of imitation made him 
often assume the condition that he lacked. He resented the equal- 
ity, but shrank from standing out as different. He was keenly re- 
sentful of anything that seemed like coercion, but saw nothing in- 
- consistent in being intolerant of the habits or opinions of others. 
The uniformity of frontier life did not make for toleration. 

His intense individuation made him likely to admire those who 
seemed to have the traits that he admired in himself. The dueling 
code survived longest in the parts of the United States in which 
frontier roughness lasted longest. In part this may have been due 
to a real need for self help and to the fact that the man who was 
quickest on the trigger finished the fight. But it was equally due 
to the intense sensitiveness bred by loneliness and equality. He 
could not bear the thought that another might look down upon 
him. He could see the extra loneliness that peculiarities brought 
to certain individuals and was quick to resent any slur or fancied 
slight. The frontier rather admired Burr for his duel with Hamil- 
ton. It never thought less of Jackson because he carried in his 
body for a quarter of a century a bullet he had stopped in an al- 
tercation with the Bentons in 1813. Popularity was easily built 
up upon hero worship, and the best hero was he who had no traits 
that the frontier could not understand. 

The equalitarian conditions thus bred a dislike of superiority; 
and the individuation produced a high regard for those in whom 
it was most pronounced. There was also in the western character, 
and quite as firmly grounded in experience as either of these, an 
expansive trait that the word idealism only roughly describes. 

The successful pioneer lived a life of progress. He began with 
untouched nature, and each year saw a larger area of cleared lands, 


252 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


a better group of buildings, a more selected herd of stock, and 
greater freedom due to increase in financial resources. The young 
and poor bore their lot the better because of the firm conviction 
that they were some day to be established and rich. There was no 
class of permanent farm laborers, and almost no certain domestic 
help. There were no barriers of caste to prevent a man from rising 
in the esteem of his community; and in spite of the language of 
democratic equality, influence was largely based upon attainment. 
The habit of believing in personal progress and growth had a 
parallel in the certitude of social progress and development. The 
first scattered farmers of a region knew that they were to become 
leaders in local and county government; that improvements would 
surely come; that statehood was inevitable. The mature men 
were entitled to believe that the senatorial toga might descend 
upon them; and they brought up their boys in the belief that any 
of them might be President. The American worship of the self- 
made man has been founded in this general knowledge that most 
Americans in the beginning were self-made. The frontier citizens 
saw the forest and prairie melting before the attack of the advanc- 
ing farms. They saw the Indians recede towards further western 
homes. They heard that the United States was moving its empire 
west. Only the conviction that the country beyond the Missouri 
was worthless kept them, at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, from visualizing the United States as a continental 
power. But they took for granted the idea that progress and ex- 
pansion would come as needed. And none of them shied at a new 
idea merely because it had not yet come to pass. The life of change 
and growth they lived made them natural expansionists and ideal- 
ists. And when they came together on their local feast days, the 
Fourth of July, or Washington’s Birthday, or the anniversary of 
New Orleans, their orators let their fancy play around that future 
greatness of themselves which all conceded. The stabler com- 
munities, with less mobility for the individual, kept their fancies 
closer to the ground. 

The West was impregnated with the potentialities of equality, 
individuation, and idealism in 1819, and was ready to follow a 
leader that it loved. The old men, of the revolutionary generation, 
had lost its confidence, and no new leader was in the year of the 
panic ready to assert a compelling leadership. The parties of the 
beginning of the century had lost their fire, and the cooling ashes 
had failed to bring to life a real or mythical phoenix. 


JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 253 


The decay of the Federalist party ran a steady course after its 
defeat by Jefferson in 1800, until the Hartford Convention gave 
it the death blow in 1814. Its national significance was only that of 
a minority which made up in virulence what it lacked in votes. 
Its local control was every year contested by younger aspirants 
who were in sympathy with the Jeffersonians and jealous of the 
old aristocracy. Under Federalist lead, New England opposed the 
War of 1812, even refusing to let the militia be used by the United 
States, as the Constitution contemplates. The secret meeting at 
Hartford may have had no overt intention, but to the rest of the 
country it looked like a separatist movement, and something less 
than loyal. The Federalists who took part in it, and their de- 
scendants, have not ceased explaining away its evil appearance. 
But after the convention, there was no future left for the Federal- 
ists as a party organization. 

The decline of the Federalists removed the necessity of the 
‘Democrats to organize their party, and offer a program to the 
country. Sharp cleavages in the dominant party were visible as 
early as 1811, and increased thereafter. The fight for internal im- 
provements and an American system was a fight of Democrats 
against Democrats. The party name ceased to have much mean- 
ing when the opposition evaporated, and members of the same 
nominal party were on both sides of every issue. The older Demo- 
crats, of Jefferson’s period, acquired the conservatism that comes 
with age and office; the western States produced younger, more 
emphatic, and less tested claimants for the party places. After the 
admission of Missouri there were nine new western States in the 
Union, with eighteen senators out of the forty-eight who composed 
the Senate. No other section of the United States could command 
so large a group, with so much in common. They united in raising 
a western cry for a new democratic message; but among them the 
minor issue arose: whose should it be? The democracy of Clay, or 
that of Jackson? 

The relative strength of Clay and Jackson after 1815 became 
thus the most significant question in American politics. The 
sources of Clay’s strength lay in long and useful service. His repu- 
tation was earned and warranted as that of no other westerner had 
been. But there was a weakness in his leadership due in part to the 
nature of his plan, and in part to the sectional influences involved 
in the cotton culture and in the rise of the southern plantatior 
system. As he offered the American System to the country, with 


254 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


greater definiteness, year after year, and as local politicians de-— 
voted themselves to the study of its probable precise effects upon 
their own regions, he retained and increased his support from the 
West. The Middle States fell in line with enthusiasm. New Eng- 
land provided more converts as the factories and their dependents 
multiplied. But the South remained cold, and turned its coldness 
into antipathy. 

Every year, after 1815, the South became more subject to the 
political leadership of the cotton planter. It is true that only a 
minority of the southerners, say one in four, ever owned slaves. 
It is equally true that only a small proportion of those who had 
slaves had enough to man a plantation. But the economic arrange- 
ments that developed the most striking southern institution cap- 
tured the imagination even of those who suffered from it. Until 
after 1850, the voice of the non-slaveholding southerners was al- 
most without influence in southern councils. The cotton planter 
raised his cotton, shipped it abroad, and bought most of his sup- 
plies in a foreign market. The cotton region was so well provided 
with navigable streams that most of the crop could be floated from 
near its place of growth to a convenient port of export. The im- 
ports that the planter received in return for his cotton passed 
through the customhouses that the tariff system entailed. And 
to the planter who paid it, the tariff seemed to be an injurious tax. 

As the South became more dominated by slavery and cotton, it 
crystallized against a protective tariff. There were no local manu- 
factures to be protected, and no local mill hands whose occupation 
depended upon a successful competition with European makers. 
The protectionist claimed that the benefits of protection were 
spread over all the country, but the southerner thought they were 
monopolized by the northern beneficiary. The tariff became for 
the South a piece of sectional class legislation. The planter thought 
that he was taxed for the benefit of the northern mill owner and 
could not be disabused of the idea. In 1816, there was little theo- 
retical or sectional discussion upon the tariff. Calhoun was one of 
its supporters. By 1824, so rapidly had the sectionalism grown 
that the South was almost solid against it. Clay managed to swing 
the Kentucky delegation into line for it, but nearly every other 
southern congressman voted no upon its passage. 

The tariff was so important an element in the American system 
that the refusal of the South to support it made the whole system 
a failure as a political solution. There was even a southern ob- 


JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 255 


jection to the internal improvements which were the other half of 
the American System. These improvements could not be voted 
by Congress without tending to exalt the power of the Govern- 
ment of the United States. The southern leaders had always an 
objection to loose construction of the Constitution; and, after 
northern voices began to be raised against slavery, acquired a 
special reason for restricting Federal activity to narrow limits. It 
came out in the debate over Missouri that the northern congress- 
men believed that Congress could by law exclude slavery from the 
territories, and the Missouri Compromise was based upon such a 
law. To the South this was a dangerous extension of Federal 
power, and there arose the fear that one day Congress, under 
northern leadership, might try to attack slavery in the States. It 
was so dangerous to admit national ideas, even for useful ends, 
that the South progressively receded into the recesses of strict 
construction. The erratic John Randolph saw far into the future 
when he advised the South to “keep on the windward side of trea- 
son,’ but short of this to do everything to obstruct the exercise of 
new powers by Congress. 

The American System was weak as a national formula because 
the South could not accept either of its premises. It was weak as a 
political solvent because its acceptance carried no intoxication. 
It took a sober man and a thoughtful one to appreciate the struc- 
ture and balance of its parts. The better it was understood, the 
less could it be adapted to the prevailing western style of exhorta- 
tion. The conflict that, at the opening of the century, divided the 
learned Calvinistic sermons of the Presbyterians from the broad, 
glowing, evangelistic utterances of the revival leaders, was re- 
peated when Clay’s system came into competition with the reso- 
nant democracy that Andrew Jackson embodied in his own life. 

From his extreme youth, if the legends may be trusted, Jack- 
son’s conduct had an appeal for the democratic heart. He was 
born in the typical cabin and showed his independence when as a 
lad he refused with scorn to clean a British officer’s boots. He had 
a share in building the State of Tennessee and represented his 
State in Congress. He was a hero and a victor. 

As a hero, Jackson figured as victor over the Indians in many 
campaigns. Early in the War of 1812, he showed popular insub- 
ordination in refusing to disband his men at Natchez instead of 
marching them home. Late the next summer, his prompt move- 
ment after the massacre at Fort Mims gave encouragement to the 


956 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Southwest and renown to the leader. His unusual ability to get 
results out of the unorganized and shifting units of the army 
marked him as a real military leader; and this is a much firmer 
footing for his military reputation than his spectacular victory at 
New Orleans. After the war he remained in the army and showed 
a willingness to take responsibility in a popular southwestern 
cause when he invaded Florida and broke up the centers of danger 
there. The administration rewarded him by making him governor 
of Florida Territory, but he gained more advantage from the 
criticisms directed against him for invading Spain. 

In January, 1819, while John Quincy Adams was putting the 
final touches on the treaty with Spain that was to close the Florida 
question, Clay attacked Jackson in Congress, supporting a resolu- 
tion censuring the general for his entry into Florida and his arbi- 
trary execution of two British subjects there. He drew a graphic 
picture of the invasion. Standing upon the lofty plane from which 
he was encouraging the other American republics in their struggle 
for independence, Clay warned his colleagues that “‘ We are fight- 
ing a great moral battle, for the benefit not only of our own coun- 
try, but of all mankind. The eyes of the whole world are in fixed 
attention upon us. One, and the largest portion of it, is gazing 
with contempt, with jealousy, with envy; the other portion, with 
hope, with confidence, with affection. ... Beware how you give a 
fatal sanction, in this infant period of our republic, scarcely two- 
score years old, to military insubordination. Remember that 
Greece had her Alexander, Rome her Cesar, England her Crom- 
well, France her Bonaparte, and that if we would escape the rock 
on which they split we must avoid their errors.”’ Neither house of 
Congress was willing to vote the censure that Clay urged, but his 
advocacy of it emphasized the contest between him and Jackson 
for the position as leader of the West. It made him weaker, and 
Jackson stronger. The very traits he attacked were those that the 
frontiersman had only to see to admire. The mere thought that 
Jackson was subject to censure from Monroe’s administration 
made him friends. 

In anticipation of the election of 1824 the adherents of Andrew 
Jackson pushed him for the presidency, but without hope of being 
able to control the congressional caucus that had, in several recent 
elections, made the nomination for the party.?, Crawford was the 


2 Homer J. Webster, History of the Democratic Party Organization in the Northwest, 1824- 
1840 (1915), first appeared in the Publications of the Ohio Archeological and Historica] 
Society. 


JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 257 


caucus candidate. Adams was the choice of the New England 
leaders, strong because he had escaped the danger of taint of 
Federalism. Clay was backed by the middle group. Jackson was 
the hero of the West. It was entirely possible to support Jackson, 
yet believe in Clay; it was more thrilling than to stand for Clay. 
The Jackson men attacked the caucus because it could not be con- 
trolled, and developed a theory palatable to Democrats that it was 
a non-popular institution and hence unworthy. When Jackson 
appeared to have a plurality of the popular votes, though not a 
majority of the electoral college, his friends asserted that this 
plurality was a mandate upon the House of Representatives to 
elect him, as the leading of the three candidates. When the House 
passed over his claim to elect John Quincy Adams, Jackson be- 
came a martyr, and John Randolph thundered his denunciation of 
the “infamous coalition” of “‘Puritan and blackleg.”’ During the 
whole of the Adams administration, while Adams and Clay were 
using all their powers to put the American System into effect, the 
Jackson men were fighting them for partisan advantage; and in 
1828 Jackson was triumphantly elected. The West and South 
could vote as a unit upon frontier virtues and Jackson’s popularity, 
whereas they were divided when it came to endorsing Clay’s pro- 
gram. The Democratic party of which Jackson became the head 
had a new birth, freshly invigorated by contact with the funda- 
mentals of the West, and managed by a group of political leaders 
new upon the national stage. The defeated elements of Jefferson’s 
old party speedily ceased to be Democrats at all, and received a 
new name of National Republicans; and once more there was an 
opposition at Washington. 


CHAPTER XXIX 
THE EAST, AND THE WESTERN MARKETS 


JOHN Quincy ApAms, Henry Clay, and the American System came 
into their own in 1825, and for four years gave expression to a new 
set of ideas that was working a transformation in the character of 
the United States Government. John Marshall, through his crea- 
tive decisions in the Supreme Court, gave a new legal philosophy 
that percolated through the courts to the bar, and thence to the 
politicians and the people. By 1830 the fact that such a change 
was under way was clear enough for Webster to assume his na- 
tionalist rédle in his reply to Hayne; and for the forces that feared 
such transformation of the Government to take refuge in State 
rights and to find in the restrictive philosophy of John C. Calhoun 
an expression of their desires. The cleavage in opinion was sec- 
tional largely because cotton and slave labor built up a section 
that could not avoid serving its major interests. But between 1825 
and the reply to Hayne in 1830 the southern opposition was not 
strong enough to block the rapid development of the United States 
along the lines pointed out by Marshall and Henry Clay. 

From the passage of the Road Survey Act of 1824, Congress was 
ready to assist internal improvements in various ways. The topo- 
graphical engineers of the army were at the disposal of the pro- 
moters of new highways, for there were as yet no civil engineers in 
civil life. The military engineer was an indispensable unit in the 
work. The list of works begun and carried through by Congress 
steadily increased, although not one attained the magnitude of the 
Cumberland Road. Its western extension, known as the National 
Road, was undertaken in 1825. Numerous schemes of river and 
harbor improvements were adopted. In many cases in which Con- 
gress could not be induced to take the full responsibility for a pro- 
ject, it was still possible to procure a generous Federal subscription 
in the form of purchase of stock, so that the Government became a 
partner in corporate enterprise, as it had earlier been a partner 
with every farmer who bought his land on installments. But the 
Government aid came too late to meet the full demands that were 
expressed during the years of the great migration; and it was never 
as generous as enthusiasts hoped for. Even before the obstruction 


THE EAST, AND THE WESTERN MARKETS — 259 


from the White House had ceased, State efforts and private capital 
started upon the task of supplying the more imperative needs of 
commerce between the sections. 

The first great efforts to bring together the eastern and western 
markets, after the inception of the Cumberland Road, were of 
eastern origin, and were based upon two main hopes. One of these 
was the normal desire to capture the markets created in the Ohio 
Valley by the great migration, and is to be regarded as a far- 
sighted reaching out for business. The other was the fear of a new 
competitor in New Orleans and the determination to keep the 
western settlements in trade relations with the East. 

The development of the western trade of seaboard towns began 
with the extension of population into the Appalachian valleys. 
The first migrants were followed, at an interval, by the proces- 
sions of covered wagons owned by the merchants of Baltimore and 
Philadelphia, carrying stocks of store goods to be sold or peddled 
on the frontier. As soon as the Forbes Road was passable, it was 
used by this traffic. Never was the business large enough to satisfy 
the merchants, and never was the supply of store goods large 
enough to please the westerners. The further the routes projected 
themselves into the interior, the higher went the freight charges; 
and by the time Pittsburgh arose at the head of the Ohio, the dis- 
tance had become so long that few goods could stand the cost of 
shipment. The Cumberland Road was designed to carry this busi- 
ness, and, by improving the route, to lower the cost. To Philadel- 
phia and Baltimore the Cumberland Road came as a natural and 
desirable improvement of what these regions already possessed. 
The other towns of the seaboard were less certain and were in- 
clined to see in the road a special advantage which they coveted 
for themselves. New York and Charleston, particularly, had their 
attention directed to the western trade, and to the fact that Phila- 
delphia and Baltimore had greater advantages than they pos- 
sessed. 

The desires of New York and Charleston grew in intensity with 
the progress of the great migration and were stimulated by the 
fear of what the steamboats might do. Roosevelt’s boat on the 
Ohio was an object lesson, and a precursor of an inland trade whose 
natural outlet would not be any city on the Atlantic. Just so soon 
as the up-river boats could be relied upon, there was nothing to 
prevent New Orleans from becoming the great distributing center 
of the interior. The Appalachians presented a natural limit to the 


260 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


trading areas of the seaboard; there was no limit east of the Rockies, 
to the commercial empire of New Orleans. Between the desire for 
western trade and the fear that New Orleans would appropriate it, 
the East stirred itself to offer competition; and when Congress could 
not be induced to respond at once, the East used its own resources. 

The State of New York was conscious from an early period of 
the natural highway that lay subject to its disposal between the 
upper reaches of the Mohawk River, the south shore of Lake 
Ontario, and the eastern end of Lake Erie. Because of French 
proximity and Indian occupation this highway was never fre- 
quented during the colonial period, and the safer routes from the 
Delaware and the Susquehanna to the “pleasant lands behind” 
monopolized the traffic. But with the end of the Revolution, the 
surrender of the forts by England, and the stabilizing of the Six 
Nations, there was no longer a reason for checking the flow of New 
York and New England at old Fort Stanwix. Before the year 
1800 the ancient settlements of the Dutch Flats on the Mohawk 
had been extended for the whole length of the river, and the set- 
tlers had begun te use the Mohawk and the Hudson as their route 
of communication for whatever trade they had. The obstruction 
in the Mohawk at Little Falls, some seventy miles above its 
mouth, was a serious inconvenience to the settlers who lived 
around Utica and Rome, above that point. The Massachusetts 
land controversy was adjusted, the Holland Land Company had 
bought its tract near Lake Erie, the Connecticut Land Company 
was prospecting around Cleveland. There was growing promise of 
business in the country beyond the Mohawk. 

The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company was ready for 
business in the winter of 1796, having been formed to meet the 
demand for river improvement on the Mohawk. It built a series 
of five locks around the rapids at Little Falls, and by thus over- 
coming the forty-two foot drop in the Mohawk here, made the 
whole river navigable for small boats as far inland as Fort Stan- 
wix, or Rome. It also called attention to the fact, that dreamers 
had often noted, that there was no real obstruction in the way of 
extending the locks and canal from the head of the Mohawk to the 
Oswego, or the Genesee, or even to the Niagara River at some 
point above the falls. With a water route from New York City to 
Lake Erie before his mind, the pamphleteer or letter writer waxed 
poetic upon the future of New York. In this instance his wildest 
dreams could not approach reality. As the impending construc- 


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262 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


tion of the Cumberland Road called the attention of New York to | 
what Pennsylvania was to have, the project of an Erie Canal 
passed from the realm of prophecy to that of practical politics. 

As early as 1810, at a time when Albert Gallatin was suggesting 
a chain of coast-line waterways at the expense of the United 
States, New York procured a survey of the route along which an 
Erie Canal must pass. DeWitt Clinton, son of a famous political 
family, was one of the first commissioners, and remained through- 
out the leading prophet of the canal. Federal aid was asked but 
was not obtained; and with the War of 1812 on hand, no one ex- 
pected it. By 1816 New York had given up its hope of Federal aid 
and had crystallized its determination to have a canal. In Europe 
the advocates of canals were getting the better of the advocates of 
turnpikes, in the argument over trade extension. A new era of 
internal communication was dawning. In 1817, Clinton, who was 
now governor of the State, elected upon the canal issue, broke 
ground for the Erie Canal at a point near Fort Stanwix. 

While the Erie Canal was under debate, there was a develop- 
ment of the idea respecting the significance of canals. First they 
were projected as river improvements, like the Little Falls canal. 
It was then thought that the loaded barges could be towed in the 
rivers, using canals merely as a means of getting around the falls 
and rapids. A little experience, however, brought forth the in- 
adequacy of most streams for canal use. Unless a river, like the 
Hudson, was great enough for independent navigation, it was not 
satisfactory for transportation in both directions. The current 
was variable, the water’s edge shifted after every shower. The 
towpath was in danger of being elevated beyond reach, or else 
submerged beneath the stream. There developed the advantage 
of a ditch, substantially level, with water fed in through sluice 
gates as needed, and run off when excessive. The capital outlay 
was heavy, but once built the canal could be owned like any other 
property, and all users could be made to pay for their share of it. 
The Erie Canal was at last projected from the Hudson to Lake 
Erie, its three main divisions being from Albany to Rome; Rome 
to the Seneca River; Seneca to Lake Erie. The size of the locks 
determined the capacity of the waterway, being ninety feet by 
twelve. The cross section revealed a stream four feet deep, forty 
feet wide at the surface, and twenty-eight on the bottom. The 
boats that could be floated and passed through the locks were 
estimated as carrying about one hundred tons. 


THE EAST, AND THE WESTERN MARKETS — 263 


It was a long distance in time and experience between the ground 
breaking and the completion of the Erie Canal. There was no 
American precedent for such a work, and no earlier need to ac- 
cumulate so large a capital for a single enterprise. The credit of 
the State of New York did it; and Governor Clinton had con- 
tinuously to hold the desire of the State up to the task it had 
undertaken. The panic of 1819 intervened, when sensible men 
knew that the money could not be raised; but Clinton kept his 
courage. Every year the population of the West was growing; and 
every year the steamboats built up for New Orleans a better or- 
ganization of the river trade. But by 1824 the Erie Canal was 
nearly done, and in October, 1825, Clinton took part in the na- 
tional celebration that signalized success. 

On October 26, 1825, the canal boat Seneca Chief, with Clinton 
and his party as passengers, and with lesser participants following 
in other craft, started its triumphal procession from Buffalo to 
New York. There was no Buffalo before the canal, and no settle- 
ment along its route west of Rome. By the date of completion, 
homes dotted the canal zone throughout its length, and at Buffalo 
a lake port was developing a new group of western connections. 
For the first time the Upper Lakes were in real contact with the 
world. The Seneca Chief carried the news to the ocean. A salvo of 
artillery fire, relayed in advance, announced the coming of the 
procession. A keg of the waters of Lake Erie was carried in sym- 
bolic fashion to be emptied into the Atlantic. At every station 
along the canal banquets were eaten and toasts were drunk. At 
Albany, where the canal ended, the boats were taken in tow by a 
steamer; and on November 4, the ninth day of the trip, New York 
was reached. 

The effect of the Erie Canal upon the development of both the 
city at its mouth and the country behind it was beyond any ex- 
pectation. Before 1830 there developed an up-state frontier New 
York that would have become another State had it been further 
away, and whose significance was obscured because it lay inside a 
State already existing. But no New York politician has been un- 
aware of it.! Before 1840 the south shore of Lake Erie was colo- 
nized with towns and communities all of which saw the world 
through New York eyes. Before 1850 both Michigan and Wiscon- 
sin had been added to the United States, largely as results of the 


1 Charles McCarthy, The Antimasonic Party; A Study in Political Antimasonry, 1827+ 
1840 (1902). 


264 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


population shift that the canal occasioned; and the Old North- 
west had become conscious of the fact that it contained two re-— 
gions, the newer being a Yankee tract that fought the Democrats 
of the Ohio Valley at every turn. By 1860 the region tributary to 
New York was a sufficient unit to bind the East to the West, and 
to maintain the Union. New York City, meanwhile, had out- 
grown its fears and jealousies of Philadelphia and Baltimore, and 
had come into the full enjoyment of its imposing harbor and its 
trade control of the easiest route into the American continent. 
The desires of New York merchants for their share of the western 
markets started many things whose limits they could not foresee. 

Before the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, the people of 
Pennsylvania and Maryland were shaken in the complacency with 
which they had hitherto regarded their control of western trade. 
The Cumberland Road was worn out before it was finished, and 
Congress could not pass a law for its repair. New Orleans was 
rising in importance all the time, and New York, with upstart 
hopes, was threatening to upset the balance. With such a back- 
ground, the activities of the merchant population of Philadelphia 
and Baltimore must be regarded after 1821.? 

Pennsylvania had the same motives that New York possessed 
to improve upon the Cumberland Road. It had in addition a fear 
of the competition of New York. It had lost its faith in turnpikes 
by 1825, and in this year its legislature authorized the survey of 
the routes across the mountains between Philadelphia and Pitts- 
burgh in the hope of finding a route for a canal, or for a tunnel 
through which aroad might run. The next year the State started in 
upon the building of a composite engineering work, having found 
a group of engineer advisers whose consciences let them assert that 
it could compete with the Erie Canal. But whether it could com- 
pete or not, political necessity forced the government of Penn- 
sylvania not to sit by idly while New York gathered in the western 
trade. 

The Pennsylvania System, as it was called, for no single word 
could adequately describe it, was ready for use throughout in 1834. 
From Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, its total length was nearly four 
hundred miles. From Philadelphia to Columbia on the Susque- 
hanna River, tracks were laid down for a tramway, over which it 


2M. Reizenstein, “‘Economic History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,’ in Johns 
Hopkins University Studies, vol. xv; Wm. B. Wilson, History of the Pennsylvania Railroad 
Company (1899); and of course Hulbert, in his Historic Highways. 


THE EAST, AND THE WESTERN MARKETS — 265 


was proposed to haul wagons for any one who would equip his 
vehicles with wheels that would fit the tracks. At Columbia, a 
canal along the Susquehanna River continued the line to the 
mouth of the Juniata, the goods and passengers having been trans- 
shipped to canal boats. The canal followed the Juniata as far into 
the mountains as it could, coming to an end at Hollidaysburg. 
Even the hopeful Pennsylvania engineers were never able to pro- 
cure water for the canal on top of the Alleghany Mountains. From 
Hollidaysburg, over the ridge and down to Johnstown on the Cone- 
maugh River, there was a tramway running over a series of in- 
clined planes and levels and through a long tunnel at the crest. 
Horse power was used to haul the wagons on the levels. Stationary 
engines and cables let the cars up and down the slopes, and be- 
tween the terminals of this inclined railway there was overcome a 
combined ascent and descent of twenty-five hundred feet. From 
Johnstown another canal completed the route to Pittsburgh, by 
way of the Allegheny River. 

There was no questioning the scenic beauties of the Pennsyl- 
vania System of improvements. For the decade of the thirties, the 
traveler in America felt that his opportunities were not fulfilled 
unless he had made the journey by the canal boat packets from 
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Eventually freight was hauled in 
sectional cars that could be taken off their trucks and put into 
water as boats so as to avoid the necessity for handling the goods. 
Steam locomotives were in use on the tramway end of the line 
before 1834. But the cost of operation was such that Pennsylvania 
could never earn interest on its investment, and in 1857 the State 
was glad to sell the system to the Pennsylvania Railroad Com- 
pany, which scrapped it. The whole work is, however, of interest 
as showing the intensity of the Pennsylvania desire to retain and 
enlarge its share in the traffic of the western markets. The ex- 
ample of Pennsylvania was an immediate stimulant to the people 
further south who feared that this enterprise might cut them out 
of their share of western profits. 

Maryland and Virginia, whose peculiar relationship to the 
Potomac River was one of the causes occasioning the creation of 
the Federal Constitution, were equally concerned in the commerce 
to which the Potomac Valley led. Washington’s connection with 
the Potomac Company of 1784 was founded in the belief that a 
canal might be cut through from the Chesapeake to the Ohivc. 
With the building of the Cumberland Road, the agitation of the 


266 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


canal promoters was stilled for the time; but with the undertaking 
of the New York and Pennsylvania works it came to life again. 
As discussed in the twenties, the project took the form of a canal 
from the rapids in the Potomac, above Georgetown, to the Ohio 
River. Between Georgetown and Fort Cumberland the canal 
could follow the familiar valley route that had been well known 
since the colonial days when Alexandria, Virginia, was port of 
entry for freight and immigrants. As the discussion advanced, the 
interest of Baltimore merchants in the scheme cooled off, because 
only by an artificial route could the canal be made to touch Balti- 
more or to add anything to the trading advantages of that town. 

A separate Baltimore improvement plan was developed after 
Virginia had determined to proceed alone with its canal, and 
during 1827 charters were granted by both Maryland and Penn- 
sylvania for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. “Little 
known as railroads are in America,” said the North American 
Review, ... “the scheme is certainly a bold one, of constructing 
a road of this sort, not less than two hundred and fifty miles in 
length, and surmounting an elevation of three thousand feet.” 
The engineers of the army were relied upon for the preliminary 
surveys, and a surviving signer of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, broke ground for the en- 
terprise on July 4, 1828, after what Niles’ Register described as 
“The most splendid civic procession, perhaps, ever exhibited in 
America.” The charters of the road required it to be done by 
1843, but before the line had even reached Fort Cumberland, the 
panic of 1837 intervened. Not until after 1850 was the work done. 
The competition for the western trade thus led Maryland to risk 
the venture with the newest of the devices in communication. 

South of the line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Chesa- 
peake and Ohio Canal and the South Carolina Railroad were addi- 
tional testimony to the lure of western business. The former of 
these was begun by President John Quincy Adams on the same day 
that ground was broken for the Baltimore and Ohio. It, also, was 
blocked by the panic; and unlike the railroad never recovered from 
the check. It was finished to Fort Cumberland, and stopped 
there.’ 

The South Carolina Railroad originated in Charleston’s jealousy 
of the towns along the Gulf. As the cotton region spread over the 


* Corra Bacon-Foster, Early Chapters in the Development of the Patomac Route to the 
West (1912). 


THE EAST, AND THE WESTERN MARKETS — 267 


lowlands of Carolina and Georgia, Charleston developed and con- 
solidated its commercial leadership of the South. It was not as 
immediately suspicious of New Orleans as were the cities further 
north along the coast. But it watched the extension of cotton 
acreage into the uplands of Georgia and Alabama with fear that 
the cotton might find its way to a market down the Chattahoochee 
or the Alabama, and thus transfer commercial leadership to an- 
other region. In 1827, South Carolina chartered a railroad to run 
west from Charleston to Hamburg, at the falls of the Savannah, 
in the hope of diverting cotton to Charleston from Savannah, and 
to compete for the business of upland Georgia. The road was open 
in 1830, and was 136 miles long, the first railroad of considerable 
length to operate in the United States. It failed to accomplish its 
purpose, for Charleston could not hold its own as the cotton em- 
pire shifted; but like the other improved highways between the 
sections it helps to measure the interest the East developed in the 
West during the period of the great migration. 

The attempt of the East to hold the West, and to make its con- 
trol permanent and effective, passed into its second phase during 
the period of internal improvements. The earlier phase of the 
problem was political; the later economic. In the earlier instance 
it was uncertain whether the political bond would hold, and 
Jefferson made haste to strain the Constitution to save the Union. 
He thus bought Louisiana. In the later phase, Clay’s effort to 
induce the Union to promote internal improvements for the eco- 
nomic development of the United States was resisted by presi- 
dential opposition until private and State initiative undertook the 
task. The Erie Canal was the only successful improvement for 
many years, but it inspired imitation and opened a new period of 
economic development. The East took part, attracted by western 
profits. The West undertook public works on its own account in 
order to open up the country and disseminate prosperity. But the 
alignment of the West, with the East or with the South, remained 
uncertain for another generation; and not until both North and 
South called upon it in the Civil War was it ready with an answer, 


CHAPTER XXX 
THE WESTERN INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 


TuE years of the administration of John Quincy Adams, 1825- 
1829, mark the great inauguration of internal improvements. The 
Government of the United States was assisting in the work. Pri- 
vate capital and State resources were pledged to it. The Erie 
Canal was completed, and the eastern cities entered the race for 
western trade. The railroad period was opened with the Balti- 
more and Ohio, and the South Carolina Railroad. Inspired by the 
activity of the East and their own enthusiasms, the western States 
began improvements. In the summer in which he opened the Erie 
Canal, Governor Clinton made a special trip to Ohio to join in the 
inception of two local public works that were to make the Ohio 
River run uphill, and deliver commerce for Cincinnati and Cleve- 
land, en route to New York. | 

The distribution of population in the Old Northwest in 1825 
was still confined almost exclusively to the southern slope of the 
region on the Ohio River and its tributaries. Except in Ohio there 
was no large group of settlers north of the watershed; and even 
here the few communities that skirted the Lake Erie shore had an 
average density of under eighteen to the square mile. The Ohio 
tributaries were not useful to the innermost settlements as car- 
riers of commerce. Zane’s Trace had become a flourishing road for 
the eastern interior of the State. The United States began in 1825 
to build the National Road, in extension of the Cumberland Road 
from Wheeling, in order to meet the need of the remote frontier. 
On July 4, 1825 it broke ground at St. Clairsville, a few miles west 
of Wheeling, where the new road was to branch off from Zane’s 
Trace. But Governor Morrow of Ohio did not grace-the occasion 
with his presence, for a more important ceremony was being held 
the same day at Licking Summit, near Newark, where the Na- 
tional Road was to be crossed by the new Ohio Canal. The turn- 
pike period was no longer at its height, and the canals had cap- 
tured the imagination of the promoter.! 

The prospective opening of the Erie Canal had much to do with 


1G. W. Dial, “Construction of the Ohio Canals,’’ in Ohio Archeological and Historical 
Society Publications, vol. x11. 


THE WESTERN INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 269 


the form taken by the Ohio public works. Not since the first settle- 
ments had there been a route for the exchange of goods between 
the East and the upper Ohio Valley. The development of such 
seemed to be the condition precedent to solvency throughout 
the West. The example of New York inspired the States to ac- 
tion on their own account and stimulated a thorough study of 
the topography of the country in the search for available routes. 

The survey of canal sites revived the importance of the primi- 
tive conditions that determined the course of exploration and 
missionary activity during the French régime. Long before the 
first whites came, the Indians knew all of the interlocking streams 
that flow between the Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. They 
knew the currents, the distances, the length and convenience of 
the portages. The same elements that led to the frequent use of 
certain of the portage routes between the sections, and to the 
neglect of the others, affected their availability for canals. Where 
there was a river there was water for the canal; and where the 
grades were light the canal could be dug with fewest locks. 

There were two good portage routes east of Ohio that invited 
the inspection of the canal engineer. Of these the easternmost 
left Lake Erie near Dunkirk, New York, reached Lake Chautau- 
qua in a few miles, and thence used the Allegheny River all the 
way to the Ohio. A little further west, another started inland at 
Erie, and made a short cut to French Creek, that joins the Alle- 
gheny at Franklin, Pennsylvania. The Mahoning River, that cuts 
across northeast Ohio into Beaver Creek and the Ohio, afforded 
another route, for its headwaters interlock with those of the 
Cuyahoga. 

The most direct of the Cuyahoga lines, and one that intrigued 
the attention of Ohio from the earliest surveys, led to the head of 
the Muskingum, and thence to the Ohio River at Marietta. Cleve- 
land was at the northern terminus of this line, and the community 
around Marietta was the oldest, if not the largest in the State. 
Next west of the Cuyahoga lay the valley of the Sandusky River, 
with a spacious harbor at its mouth on Lake Erie. There was no 
village of importance as far west as Sandusky Bay in 1825, but 
there were scattered settlements along the river, whose residents 
had a large view of the importance of their future. The portage 
from the Sandusky led directly to the Scioto, in whose valley lived 
the Virginia and Kentucky settlers who had found their way to the 
Virginia Military Reserve. The new Ohio capital at Columbus 


270 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


was on the Scioto, where the National Road crossed the river. 
Below it were Circleville and Chillicothe. . 

Another of the Ohio canal routes was that of the Great Miami, 
from Cincinnati through Hamilton to Dayton, along the line of 
frontier forts built by St. Clair and Wayne to protect the country 
from the Wabash tribes. From the sources of the Great Miami, 
the Auglaize continues the line to the Maumee at Defiance, where 
Wayne erected his fort in 1794. Toledo Bay, at the mouth of the 
Maumee, provided the site for a terminus on Lake Erie. Here was 
the region claimed by both Ohio and Michigan Territory, the 
future center of the “Toledo War.” Its canal values gave to that 
war its intensity. 

The available portages did not cease at the western boundary 
of Ohio. Indiana possessed the Wabash, with a short carry 
between Fort Wayne and the Wabash River. When Wayne built 
this fort after the battle of Fallen Timbers he selected the one site 
from which the traffic of the Indians between Lake Erie and the 
Ohio could most easily be policed. There was no other Indian 
route as good as the Wabash, but engineers and scouts knew that 
it would be easy, if desired, to get from Lake Michigan to the upper 
waters of the Kankakee, and thence to the Illinois River and the 
Mississippi. The canal routes from Lake Michigan were secondary 
in importance to those from Lake Erie because of the devious 
course through Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The insignificant 
Chicago River, emptying into the head of Lake Michigan by the 
side of Fort Dearborn could sometimes be followed in wet weather 
without a portage to the Illinois and the Mississippi. On the 
prairie marshes behind Fort Dearborn there was almost no ob- 
struction to the canoe. Further north on Lake Michigan there was 
a possibility of striking west from Milwaukee to the Rock River, 
that runs parallel to the Lake, and not far inland. This would con- 
nect with the Mississippi at Rock Island. Still further north, 
Green Bay pointed to the old route most traveled from the Upper 
Lakes to the Mississippi, by way of Lake Winnebago and a chain 
of lesser lakes nearing the bend of the Wisconsin River where the 
town of Portage was eventually built. 

The three States concerned, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, began 
their surveys of these routes in the twenties, under the spell cast 
by the action of New York. They found that the obstacles to be 
overcome were financial rather than mechanical, and that at all 
times they were involved in a mesh of politics. When the States 


THE WESTERN INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 271 


avowed a determination to spend State money to improve pros- 
perity, every settled section desired to share the advantage, and 
few regions were magnanimous enough to pay the bills while other 
regions profited. 

The Ohio legislature was deadlocked for a time by the river 
claims of the three excellent routes across the State. The com- 
missioners began their study as early as 1822. The final deci- 
sion, approved in 1825, was to undertake two canals. The Ohio 
Canal was to be a compromise between the easternmost routes, 
joining the Cuyahoga and the Scioto, to the disgust of Marietta 
and Sandusky, which were left off it. The “Fire Lands” people, 
for whom Sandusky was the port of entry, were too determined to 
accept defeat. They shortly undertook the Mad River Railroad 
on their own initiative. Meanwhile, however, the Ohio Canal was 
begun at Licking Summit in 1825. Around Cuyahoga Falls, near 
Akron, farmers began immediately to raise wheat for the eastern 
market. By 1831 the canal was in use between Newark and Cleve- 
land, and a fleet of steam packets made frequent trips between 
Cleveland and Buffalo. In 1832 the canal was completed to its 
southern outlet at Portsmouth. The Ohio celebration that might 
have commemorated the termination of the task was abandoned 
because of an epidemic of cholera that swept the frontier in Oc- 
tober, 1832. But the real monument to the canal was the rapid 
growth of a prosperous strip of farming country along the route, 
much as the Erie Canal had built up a similar strip across western 
New York. The grain from Ohio poured in to the warehouses of 
New York City, to the dismay of eastern farmers whose soil was 
outclassed by the fresh prairie soils now brought to use. Cleve- 
land, which had only grown to a scant thousand inhabitants in the 
quarter century after Moses Cleaveland surveyed it, swelled to 
forty-five hundred by 1834, and kept on growing. The Democratic 
politicians, who had tuned their notes to the responses of the 
southern democrats who built up the Northwest, found it neces- 
sary to learn a different song for the counties north of the National 
Road. The northern invasion of the Old Northwest began to up- 
set the solidarity of that section. 

The second of the canals decided upon by Ohio was projected 
up into the country behind Cincinnati. Governor Clinton made 
the speech of dedication on July 21, 1825, at Middletown on the 
Great Miami, about halfway from Cincinnati to Dayton. The 
Miami Canal, as it was commonly called, made slower progress 


272 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


than the Ohio Canal because the resources of the State were in- 
sufficient to carry on two major operations at once. There was a 
good market for the Ohio canal stocks. Eastern men of means 
took some millions of them. The process of financing western im- 
provements with eastern money got slowly under way as the im- 
provement programs were launched, and never after 1825 was the 
West entirely without some eastern aid in its ventures. The 
period was over in which western development was limited by the 
resources that western funds could provide. The new financial 
ties provided at once a source of constant irritation between East 
and West, and a closer and more reliable union. 

Dayton, at the northern end of the first section of the Miami 
Canal, was not reached until 1839; much of the delay being due 
to the panic of 1837. Congress, in 1827, came to the aid of the 
canals by voting not only a free right of way through the public 
lands, but a grant of free sections as well. Within the next few 
years one half of the lands lying within five miles of the canals on 
either side were used by the States concerned to advance the 
Miami, Wabash, Illinois, and Rock River canals. Alternate sec- 
tions were retained and granted, so that a map of the canal lands 
took the appearance of a strip cut from a checkerboard, with the 
red squares devoted to the improvement, and the white reserved 
by the United States for sale. The proponents of the grants urged 
them on the ground that Government lands would be more than 
doubled in price by an adjacent canal, and that it was only fair for 
the Government to share the unearned profit with the States 
whose sacrifices made the improvements possible. Even with 
Government aid the Miami Extension to Defiance was not open 
until 1845, two years after Indiana initiative had procured the 
building of a canal the whole length of the Maumee from Toledo 
to Fort Wayne. 

The Wabash and Erie Canal had the advantage of following the 
best known route, and the disadvantage that its completion re- 
quired the concurrence of two States. It was surveyed under the 
act of 1824, and in the same year Congress provided it with a right 
of way; adding in 1827 the grant of five sections of public lands 
per mile. It was not begun until 1832, the year in which the Ohio 
Canal was finished; and it was sadly delayed by the financial 
stringency caused by the panic of 1837. In 1843 the canal was in 
operation from Toledo to Lafayette, on the Wabash. It was in 
later years projected further and further down that stream, to 


THE WESTERN INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 273 


Terre Haute, and then to Evansville. But before it could become 
as important as the Ohio Canal had been, it was out of style, and 
railroads were the rage. 

The Illinois and Michigan Canal was started under desires simi- 
lar to those of Indiana and Ohio and received the same kind of aid 
from the United States.2 Surveys were made for it in the twenties 
and the commissioners in 1830 platted a town at Fort Dearborn 
to be its Michigan terminus, naming it Chicago; but the first 
steamboat did not anchor off the shoal mouth of the Chicago 
River until the summer of 1832. The prairie State still had no 
northern end, its population in 1830 being confined to the river 
bottoms of the Ohio and Mississippi, and the angle between them. 
The National Road would have crossed this southern angle had it 
not been abandoned, incomplete, at Vandalia. The panic caught 
Illinois so hard that little construction could be put through before 
the early forties. After 1843 the canal was rapidly built and in 
1848 it was an accomplished fact. 

Even the Wabash Canal was not as significant as its promoters 
hoped. It never quite justified the wailing note of DeBow’s South- 
ern Review, that it was “stretching its line down the banks of the 
Wabash, and as fast as it extends itself, it sweeps the whole pro- 
ducts of the valley up the river, against its natural current, to the 
Eastern Markets, by way of the Lakes.’ This was the motive of 
the Northwest in the period of canal building but only the Ohio 
Canal approximated success. Even Illinois lost interest in the 
Illinois and Michigan Canal before it was finished in 1848. All the 
States received sharp lessons in the risks of public business, and 
this era of public ownership as well as of the canals reached its 
end. 

The canal period could never have flourished in the earliest 
frontier phase of any State, from lack of population, wealth, and 
business. It came to life as the first positive effort of the States to 
utilize their wealth in the direction pointed out by Clay’s American 
System; and was supported in the hope that such a use of capital 
would increase returns and spread prosperity. The building of 
canals through unsettled regions, where land was hardly worth the 
Government minimum of $1.25, was justified upon the plea that 
population would increase, and that taxable values would grow 
rapidly enough to warrant the outlay. The movement failed in 


2 J. W. Putman, “‘Economic History of the Illinois and Michigan Canal,”’ in Journal of 
Political Economy, vol. xvi. 


974 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the Northwest from lack of skill and funds. In the Southwest it 
was never far advanced, for the southern man of means needed all - 
his capital to hold his slaves and had little free for investment. 

The positive results of the canal construction were most felt 
within the area indicated by Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and 
Toledo. Here the canals distributed immigration, and collected 
the freights. Business relationships were established with the 
East, though they were not neglected with New Orleans. The 
fleets of steamboats increased on western rivers in spite of all 
canals, and New Orleans maintained a worthy rivalry with New 
York. 

The western public works and the struggle of the East to reach 
the western markets, gave wide advertisement to the frontier 
regions in the years after 1825. There was a falling off in migra- 
tion after the boom year of 1819, and the burden of debts was not 
forgotten until the twenties were well advanced. But every new 
enterprise taken up after 1825 called new attention to western 
opportunity and stimulated the movement of population. The 
canal lands, as they came upon the market, advertised specific 
regions. The opening of the Ohio Canal marks the beginning of 
another period comparable to the great migration, although there 
were fewer States to be created as a result. From 1832 until 1837 
this wave of population flowed in swelling dimensions over the 
regions of the older settlements and out upon the public domain. 
For the first time since the beginning of the western movement the 
areas of available lands were limited. Behind the agricultural 
frontier there was a population of towns and farms growing more 
dense each year. Beyond it stood a barrier made up of the inter- 
national boundaries of the United States, the desert across the 
Mississippi, and a solid Indian frontier that had come into exist- 
ence since the inauguration of John Quincy Adams. This Indian 
frontier placed a limit upon expansion as well as upon the imagi- 
nation of the American people. 


CHAPTER XXXI 
THE PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841 


WHEN the international boundaries of the United States were 
stabilized by the English treaty of 1818 and the Spanish treaty of 
1819, it appeared to contemporaries that the country had reached 
the limit of its external growth. There was no serious thought that 
either Canada or Mexico would become parts of the United States, 
and even when the exhilaration of patriotic holidays was felt there 
were few whose flights of fancy reached a nation that stretched 
beyond the Rocky Mountains. Clay accepted the fact of national 
completeness, and devised his American System for the further- 
ance of its internal advantage. Monroe and Adams accepted it, 
-and the former made his memorable gesture of defiance of the 
European world in his message to Congress in 1823. The War De- 
partment accepted it, and carried out its reorganization after the 
War of 1812, upon the supposition that the United States had little 
to fear from foreign enemies, and was chiefly concerned with in- 
ternal police along the border. The chain of frontier forts, from 
Fort Smith to Fort Howard, were testimony to this view; and in 
the course of erecting them, the War Department and the Presi- 
dent learned much of the native races for whose control and pro- 
tection they were built.! 

The new States that were the legacy of the great migration es- 
tablished a new frontier of organized government for the United 
States. After 1821 the further boundary of the States ran from 
Lake Erie, at Toledo, around Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Tennes- 
see, Mississippi, and Louisiana, to the Gulf of Mexico. From the 
standpoint of the War Department the new States raised a cer- 
tainty that could not be ignored. The history of the States thus 
far showed that no white community lived contentedly with an 
Indian community in its vicinity. Even the organized territories 
protested when the tribes were not removed fast enough to please 

1¥, L. Paxson, The Last American Frontier (1910). Lewis Cass discussed these experi- 
ences in ““The Removal of the Indians,”’ in North American Review, vol. xxx; Annie H. Abel 
gives intense detail in Indian Consolidation west of the Mississippi (1906); Ruth A. Gallaher 
has reconsidered the matter in “The Military-Indian Frontier, 1830-1835,” and “The 


Indian Agent in the United States before 1850,’’ appearing in recent volumes of the Iowa 
Journal of History and Politics, 1917. 


276 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


them; but the States expected to be freed of them. Georgia made 
this the price of its cession of western lands to Congress in 1802; 
and was repeatedly complaining because the Cherokee, which was 
the tribe chiefly concerned, showed a preference for staying where 
it was. Thus far it was a simple matter, when dealing with the 
tribes, lo persuade them to surrender their old homes, and to drift 
further west. But the time had come, by 1821, when the available 
region of the West was narrowed down by the boundaries of the 
United States, and the western boundary of the several States. If, 
as was certain, Arkansas and Michigan Territories should rise to 
statehood; if a State should be formed north of Illinois, and per- 
haps another north of Missouri, it would become a difficult matter 
to tell the tribes where they might go when they were dispossessed 
by the pressure and demands of encroaching white populations. 
At no time in the past had a serious effort been made to formulate 
a policy for handling the Indians, except the short-lived effort of 
England, in which the Proclamation Line played a weak part. 
From pillar to post, the Indians had been driven in a piece-meal 
fashion. There was the ancient practice of shifting them towards 
the West, but no statesman or philanthropist had worked out a 
policy telling why and how this should be the case. 

John C. Calhoun, as Secretary of War for James Monroe, was 
custodian of Indian rights and interests, as well as the agent for 
their chastisement when things went wrong. Under his direction 
the army was reorganized, the forts were arranged for, and the 
Indian problem was studied now that its solution was becoming 
pressing. He submitted the results of his study to the President 
and the latter transmitted them to Congress on January 27, 1825. 
The report of Calhoun contained long summaries of the numbers, 
location, and condition of the various tribes with which the United 
States had to deal. “‘One of the greatest evils to which they are 
subject is that incessant pressure of our population, which forces 
them from seat to seat,”’ he wrote. “To guard against this evil... 
there ought to be the strongest and most solemn assurance that the 
country given them should be theirs, as a permanent home for 
themselves and their posterity.” 

As Calhoun and his countrymen looked upon the domain of the 
United States, there was no permanent home for the tribes within 
any State; and none in a region that white men were likely to de- 
sire. But beyond Missouri lay the great area of the Plains, with 
the Rockies, Canada, and Mexico as its thither boundaries. The 


THE PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841 277 


best scientific opinion had reported with emphasis that white men 
could not live here. Yet the plains abounded with game, upon 
which the Indians were most accustomed to live. The Rockies 
were a barrier, the plains were a social waste. Here was a spot 
almost providentially designed to be the Indians’ home; and Cal- 
houn advised the President to “‘acquire a sufficient tract of country 
west of the State of Missouri and the Territory of Arkansas, in 
order to establish permanent settlements in that quarter.” 

_ Monroe accepted the conclusions of Calhoun and urged them 
upon Congress as almost his last official act as President. ‘‘ The 
great object to be accomplished is, the removal of these tribes to 
the territory designated .... conveying to each tribe a good title 


to an adequate portion of land... . by providing ....a system of 
internal government... and, by the regular progress of improve- 
ment and civilization, prevent... degeneracy.” Congress re- 


ceived the recommendation with favor; and for the next fifteen 
years it, as well as the various Presidents who followed James 
Monroe, remained firm in the belief that the future of the United 
States would permit a permanent policy of devoting to Indian 
occupation the whole of the territory remaining west of the organ- 
ized States. 

There were three steps in the fulfillment of the frontier policy 
advocated by Monroe and approved by his successors. First, 
Congress must by suitable legislation make it possible for the War 
Department to carry on the negotiations and give the necessary 
assurances to the tribes; and the Senate must approve the treaties 
negotiated. Second, room must be found for the eastern or emi- 
grant tribes in a country already occupied by western or plains 
tribes. These must be induced to allow the emigrant Indians to 
settle and enjoy the new homes in peace. Third, the tribes east of 
the frontier must be persuaded to transfer their eastern lands to 
the United States and to accept western lands in exchange for 
them. The process was long and involved, but it was carried 
through. 

The approval of Congress was given. A group of treaties made 
with the western Indians in 1825 gave a sort of pledge that was 
followed up by specific laws of 1828 and 1830, in which the policy 
of colonization was described as an accepted thing. In 1832 Con- 
gress recognized its responsibility to the emigrants and created a 
Bureau of Indian Affairs in the War Department, under a Commis- 
sioner whose duty was to care for the Indian wards. Two years 


278 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


later, the great charter of the frontier Indians was enacted in the 
Indian Intercourse Act, which forbade any white person, without 
license from the Indian Commissioner, to set foot in the Indian 
Country. The Indian Country became a legal entity, comprising 
the areas reserved to various tribes by the several treaties. A large 
part of it was further safeguarded by clauses in the treaties that 
the tribes should never be required to move away from the new 
homes granted to them. The guarantee of permanence, together 
with that of freedom from injurious contacts with members of the 
white race, was at the base of the Indian policy. Unless it could be 
upheld no one thought the policy could succeed. Under various 
clauses of the removal treaties, the United States assumed respon- 
sibilities towards the emigrant tribes that had not existed previ- 
ously. Annuities were promised to some tribes, in part payment 
for the lands they gave up. Schools were promised, to teach the 
Indians letters and trades. In some cases blacksmiths and other 
artisans were to be maintained by the United States. There was a 
serious attempt to carry out the suggestion that once the tribes 
had been shifted to their final place of residence they must be lifted 
to a higher scale of civilization by the Government of the United 
States. 

Preliminary negotiations with the resident western tribes were 
taken up in the summer of 1825, when important councils were 
held with the Osage, the Kaw, and the tribes of the Upper Missis- 
sippl. Governor William Clark, of Missouri, long experienced in 
such matters, framed the treaties with the Osage and Kaw in June. 
These tribes had long resided in the western part of Missouri and 
Arkansas and had already ceded so much of their claims as was 
included in Missouri. They now surrendered all the rest, except a 
limited reserve apiece, that opened in the west upon the buffalo 
country of the high plains. The Osage reserved a fifty-mile wide 
strip, running west from the Neosho, along the present southern 
boundary of Kansas; the Kaw retained a thirty-mile strip along 
the Kansas River, well west of the Missouri line. The country 
vacated immediately along the border of Missouri was to be used 
for colonization purposes. 

Running northeast from Missouri to Lake Michigan lay the 
valley of the Upper Mississippi, still inhabited by the native tribes 
and not yet needed by prospective farmers. In this region the pur- 
pose of the United States was to consolidate the tribes and main- 
tain the peace. The forts at Rock Island, Prairie du Chien, and 


THE PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841 279 


St. Paul existed for this purpose; and at Prairie du Chien, Gov- 
ernor Clark and Governor Lewis Cass of Michigan Territory 
assembled the Sioux, Chippewa, Iowa, and Sauk and Fox nations. 
It was a long and formal council, with over a thousand Indians 
drawing rations upon its last day, August 29, 1825. It was con- 
ducted as most councils were with food, drink, and presents, with 
kind words and powerful exhortations. At its close the tribes 
agreed to keep the peace, to recognize the sovereignty of the 
United States, and to accept suitable boundaries among them- 
selves. The Sioux pledged themselves to respect a line drawn 
across the present State of Iowa, as boundary between themselves 
and the Sauk and Fox; and another line a little east of the Missis- 
sippi, as between themselves and the Chippewa. 

The colonization of the eastern tribes was a tedious process. In 
many cases they did not wish to go; in others it was hard to induce 
the Indian mind to crystallize, or to settle the differences between 
the braves who were ready to sign agreements and those who 
wanted a higher price or better terms. The negotiators for the 
Government included many men who were old hands at this work, 
having taken part in the negotiations for removals before the 
frontier policy was conceived. The novel element in the frontier 
policy was not in the removal of tribes to western lands but in the 
deliberate acceptance of the policy, the determination that it 
should be final, and the selection of a permanent tribal home. 
There had been innumerable single transactions of the same gen- 
eral character since the days of the treaties of Fort Stanwix, Hard 
Labour, and Fort McIntosh. 

Year by year, after 1825, as the details of the permanent Indian 
frontier were worked out, the eastern margin of the reserves devel- 
oped into an irregular but solid line from the Red River to Green 
Bay. There were three sections to it, with differences in character, 
but alike in constituting a permanent line between the races. 
The southern extremity of the Indian frontier was west of Arkan- 
sas Territory and before its consolidation was completed Arkansas 
became a State in 1836. The middle region, abreast of Missouri 
and Iowa, touched the Mississippi near the lead mines and was 
shaped after the creation of Iowa Territory in 1838. ‘The northern 
section represented the equilibrium reached between Indian occu- 
pation and white settlement in Minnesota and Wisconsin Terri- 
tory after the latter was created in 1836. Parallel developments 
in the dozen years between the inauguration of Adams and the 


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THE PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841 281 


panic of 1837 were the eastern competition for western trade, the 
western experiments with improvements in transportation, the 
ripening of the slavery feud between the North and the South, 
and the completion of this solid Indian front as a western barrier 
to further American extension. 

The southern section of the Indian frontier was a border section 
with Mexico and Texas, the international line of 1819 crossing a 
region whose partition between two countries the natives hardly 
recognized. The Osage and the Comanche were the most import- 
ant of the tribes whose compression was necessary to make room 
for the immigrant Indians. The tribes that moved in started to 
move before Monroe evolved his policy, and while Arkansas Terri- 
tory extended to the western boundary of the United States at the 
one hundredth meridian. These were the five great nations of the 
southeast States, the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and 
Choctaw. Until after the war of 1812 these tribes lived in Georgia 
-and Mississippi Territory and ran over into the Spanish dominions 
of Florida without regard for national ownership. The Jackson 
campaigns began their transfer to the country beyond the Missis- 
sippi, and General Jackson concluded several treaties with them in 
furtherance of this removal. The tribal governments that they set 
up when at last colonized west of Fort Smith bore closer resem- 
blance to real governments than did those of any other tribes ad- 
jacent to the American border. The northernmost of them, the 
Cherokee, settled on the Arkansas River and owned north to the 
Osage line at the thirty-seventh parallel. 

The removal of the Cherokee and the Seminole nations attracted 
more attention than the removal of all the other tribes, because 
the latter struggled violently against going, and the former could 
not be moved fast enough to satisfy the State of Georgia. The ad- 
ministration of Adams was filled with angry complaints from 
Georgia and attempts by that State to force the Cherokee out and 
extend its own laws over the lands they occupied. The pledge of 
the United States to remove these Indians, given in 1802, was 
urged by Georgia as justification for insistence. In the end the 
Cherokee gave way after they had blocked the settlement of west- 
ern Georgia and eastern Alabama for a decade. The Seminole war 
was the outgrowth of the refusal of the Seminole to abide vy the 
treaty of 1832 in which they agreed to migrate with the Creeks. 
They subsequently confirmed the agreement in 1833, and in 1834 
were called upon to move. Instead of moving they procrastinated; 


282 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


quarrels arose over the possession of fugitive slaves who had taken 
refuge among them; they imbedded themselves in the swamps and 
forests of central Florida. And through the whole administration 
of Van Buren a large part of the army was engaged in searching for 
the recalcitrants. Most of them were removed during the forties, 
but the Seminole war was a baffling irritation for many years. 

The middle section of the Indian frontier began at the northern 
limit of the Cherokee country and extended to the northwest 
corner of Missouri. In 1836 this corner was pushed further west 
by the addition to Missouri of a triangular area lying between its 
former western boundary and the Missouri River. From south to 
north the colonized tribes were given small reserves in exchange 
for the larger areas they had occupied further east. At the extreme 
southern end of the middle section the Quapaw and the united 
Seneca and Shawnee were in the angle between the Arkansas River 
and the State of Arkansas. North of these was a Cherokee strip 
allotted to the Cherokee because their main reserve was inade- 
quate. Further to the north came the New York Indians, Miami, 
Ottawa and Chippewa, Piankeshaw and Wea, Kaskaskia and 
Peoria, Shawnee, Delawares, Kickapoo, Oto and Missouri, and 
Omaha. By 1841 they presented a solid front west of Arkansas 
and Missouri. The Omaha, the most northern tribe in the series, 
agreed by treaty in 1830 that their territory lay west of the Mis- 
sourl River between the mouths of the Platte and the Big Sioux, 
and ceded to the United States their claims east of the Missouri. 
They were a native rather than an immigrant tribe, and shared 
with their neighbors to the east the condensation that was typical 
of the northern section of the Indian Country. 

The peace treaty of 1825, at Prairie du Chien, was the first step 
in consolidating the northern part of the frontier. The tribes of 
this region, at this time, comprised the Chippewa who lived along 
the southern shore of Lake Superior, and the Sioux whose various 
groups dotted the valleys of the Upper Mississippi and the Mis- 
souri and extended west from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Moun- 
tains. South of the Chippewa along Lake Michigan as far as the 
Milwaukee River were the Menominee; south of these the Pota- 
watami whose claims extended as far as Fort Dearborn and the 
Chicago River. The tribes along the Mississippi, south of the 
Sioux, were the Winnebago on the Wisconsin River and the Sauk 
and Fox whose range was on both sides of the Mississippi above 
the Illinois and Missouri. In 1825 there had as yet been little 


THE PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841 283 


pressure upon these tribes, for the agricultural frontier was still 
far southeast of the site of Chicago. There were sparse settlements 
around the old fur-trade forts, and a handful of miners at the lead 
diggings on the Mississippi, but the Indians were still in undisputed 
possession of their lands. 

Immediately after the treaty of Prairie du Chien, the shift of 
population to the Northwest began to unsettle it. From the Erie 
Canal came a swelling stream of colonists. In advance of them 
came prospectors to work the lead mines. Before 1830 the Winne- 
bago and the Sauk and Fox were under foot, and had to be re- 
strained for their own protection. During the next ten years, while 
the Jacksonian wave of migration reached its crest, all of the tribes 
between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi were either removed 
or condensed. By 1841 they had been pushed back, clearing most 
of Wisconsin and part of lowa. The Menominee remained at Green 
Bay, but west and north of them the Wisconsin River valley had 
been given up, the Chippewa receding into northern Wisconsin and 
upper Michigan, and the Sioux retiring across the Mississippi. 
The Potawatami had been removed bodily from their residence 
around Chicago to a tract ceded by the Omaha, east of the Mis- 
sourl. The Sauk and Fox had been forced across the Mississippi 
and had been compelled to cede a strip along the western side of 
that river, and the Winnebago had been colonized west of the 
Mississippi between the Sioux and the Sauk and Fox. The front of 
the Indian Country was unbroken from the Red River to Green 
Bay and Lake Michigan. 

The Indian policy of James Monroe was worked out more fully 
and permanently than most American policies have been. The 
States were so glad to get rid of the tribes that they were will- 
ing participants, and gave it a longer life than it otherwise 
would have had. But the Presidents concerned, Monroe, Adams, 
Jackson, and Van Buren, did not waver in their support of it. 
Their consistent support forces the historian to conclude that they 
believed it a policy that could be maintained. Founded as it was 
upon the supposition that the States would never extend west of 
Missouri, and in the face of the evidence accumulating after 1830 
that the Far West was to play a factor in American development, 
the living policy testifies to the firmness of the American convic- 
tion that the United States was ripe, mature, and complete in the 
decade of the twenties. ‘‘ They are on the outside of us, and in a 
place which will ever remain on the outside,’’ said a committee of 


284 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Congress at the end of Jackson’s second term. “This strip of 
country, which extends from the province of Mexico to Lake ~ 
Winnipeg on the North,” said Catlin, who knew the Indians and 
the West, “‘is almost one entire plain of grass, which is, and ever 
must be, useless to cultivating man.” 

“The plan of removing the aboriginal people who yet remain 
within the settled portions of the United States to the country west 
of the Mississippi River approaches its consummation,”’ wrote 
Jackson in his annual message for 1835. “It was adopted on the 
most mature consideration of the condition of this race, and ought 
to be persisted in till the object 1s accomplished, ... The past we 
can not recall, but the future we can provide for. .. . The pledge of 
the United States has been given by Congress that the country 
destined for the residence of this people shall be forever ‘secured 
and guaranteed to them.’...A barrier has thus been raised for 
their protection against the encroachment of our citizens.... 
After the further details of this arrangement are completed, with 
a very general supervision of them, they ought to be left to the 
progress of events.”’ By the end of 1840 most of the tribes had 
been removed to the frontier, the Indian Country was solid, and 
the administrative details of the arrangement were complete. The 
American citizen, by his own enactment, no longer possessed a 
right to advance his settlements towards the West. 

In the final stages of the Indian frontier policy, Congress and 
the War Department took up the problem of the permanent polic- 
ing of the line of reserves that had been created. Every settled 
border region adjacent to the frontier was fearful of attacks from 
the Indian side, and was under the temptation to indulge in illicit 
and profitable trade in whiskey with the tribes. 

The concentration of Indians along the new Indian front was 
real. In 1837 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs estimated that 
the Indians of the United States aggregated more than three hun- 
dred thousand, distributed as follows: 





Residentiamony ithe otatesi a. .ih vctau ae cen ete eran coe ae 12,415 
Under agreement to emigrate nec. s spent oct ie ee 36,950 
Emigrant ‘Indians’ in* West’"27 07) 207. 2a. he ean fee ont, Peete 51,827 
Indigenous westernttribes: AGN) A RUE OF BE dae ae 231,806 

332,498 


The Secretary of War, in 1837, recommended ‘‘a chain of per- 
manent fortresses along that line, and a competent organization 


THE PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841 285 


of the militia of the frontier states” as the best means of maintain- 
ing the peace; and the army was at work upon a survey of a west- 
ern road authorized by Congress in 1836. This military road was 
to connect the Red River with the Mississippi at Fort Snelling, 
running West of Arkansas and Missouri. It was never built but 
its discussion kept the project of the frontier alive. The com- 
mander of the army in the West, General E. P. Gaines, recom- 
mended in 1838 that the cordon of military posts along the border 
be built of stone, to outlast the century at least; and that they be 
connected with military bases at Memphis and St. Louis by rail- 
roads that should be built by the army in time of peace. He 
pointed out that a parallel road along the frontier would be as 
helpful to marauding Indians as to their military police, but that 
railroads radiating from convenient centers would be abreast of 
the times and would make easy the quick shift of troops from one 
front to another. His proposal, like all the rest, failed of fulfill- 
ment, for the situation of the United States changed rapidly in the 
next few years. While the Indian frontier lasted, the defense of the 
frontier settlements was entrusted to moving bodies of United 
States troops, to a regiment of mounted dragoons that were en- 
listed early in the thirties, and to the militia. The governor of the 
new State of Arkansas declared in his inaugural, in 1836, ““When 
the hardy yeomanry are disciplined and properly trained to arms, 
they are the ‘bulwark of our country.’ They are the ‘chief defense 
of nations.’’’ They were at least the chief reliance of Democratie 
leaders for the next three quarters of a century. 


CHAPTER XXXII 
THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BOOM 


SIMULTANEOUSLY with the adoption of the Indian frontier policy, 
the people of the United States again gathered themselves together 
for another wave of migration, and a new inundation of the West. 
The last wave, the great migration, reached its crest in the panic 
year 1819. For nearly a decade thereafter the migration was sub- 
normal and the active East held its people home with the oppor- 
tunities created by growing manufactures and internal improve- 
ments. The new wave formed even before Adams ceased to be 
President, and reached its largest about 1837. Permeated with 
the ideals for which Andrew Jackson stood and bringing his phi- 
losophy to its fulfillment in the constitutions of the Mississippi 
Valley, it may reasonably be described as the Jacksonian migra- 
tion. The great migration completed the organization of six new 
States between 1816 and 1821. The Jacksonian migration had a 
smaller field in which to operate, for the frontier of the States now 
came close to the Indian frontier. Its political landmarks included 
only two new States, Arkansas and Michigan, which filled in inter- 
stices of the map; but it developed the region of the Upper Missis- 
sippi, where the territories of Wisconsin and Iowa appeared and 
projected American influence outside the United States into Texas, 
where a new republic claimed its independence in 1836. The whole 
Mississippi Valley was filled with the noise and upheaval that 
came with the new boom period, and western politics creaked 
under the new strains put upon it. 

The whole population of the United States rose from 9,638,453 
in 1820 to 17,069,453 in 1840. Of this increase of almost seven and 
a half millions, more than four millions were to be found in the 
States and territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. The 
total western population was about 6,300,000, not counting the ele- 
ments in the population of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and 
the Carolinas that might with propriety be counted as western; 
and this total was nearly two hundred per cent more than it had 
been in 1820. The whole United States increased about eighty per 
cent in twenty years. The eastern States, even with the help of 
their frontier elements, increased only some sixty per cent in the 


THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BOOM 287 


same period. The States of the old South, east of the mountains, 
increased but twenty-eight per cent. These variations in rapidity 
of growth caused much concern in a country that had grown to 
expect more than twenty-five per cent increase in a single decade. 
The jealousies among the sections, the southern fear of both East 
and West, and the eastern acidity on western problems may be 
explained in part by natural rivalries. 

Furthest away from the settled region of the United States, 
the Upper Mississippi Valley was the meeting place of currents of 
settlers originating in the sections hitherto existing; and became 
the battle ground for the conflict of their ideals. When the gov- 
ernors signed the treaty at Prairie du Chien in 1825 there was still 
no pressure upon the Sioux and their immediate neighbors to give 
up their lands. The territory of Michigan extended across the two 
peninsulas from Lake Huron to the Misissippi, but there were no 
counties in this western half and no need for them until after the 
~ Winnebago war of 1827. Fort Winnebago was founded to keep 
the peace and protect the Indians in their rights, but it really served 
to make it safe for an invading column from the eastern States to 
enter the lead district and discover the attractions of the prairie 
openings and the hard wood forests of Wisconsin. In 1829, it was 
reported that twelve million pounds of lead were mined. Galena 
was booming at the northwest corner of Illinois, there were miners 
working the old diggings of Dubuque across the river in the Sauk 
and Fox country, and Mineral Point had been established by the 
prospectors in Michigan Territory. Iowa County was created in 
1829 by the legislature of that territory so that the illegal occu- 
pants, for the settlers had no rights as yet, might have institutions 
of orderly government. 

A second stream of miners and farmers ascended the Mississippi 
from the settlements of Missouri and southern Illinois. Most of 
these had southern grandparents and represented the continuation 
in the third generation of the migration that poured into the Appa- 
Jachian valleys in the period of the Revolution, and over the west- 
ern ridges at the end of the eighteenth century. ‘Their habits in 
the early years in the lead country gave rise to nicknames that 
have stood the test of time. The “‘badgers”’ came up the river, dug 
in, and stayed as permanent members of a new community; the 
“suckers,” like their finny namesakes, came up in the spring, and 
returned to Illinois before winter. 

An early badger, and one of the most distinguished, was Henry 


288 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Dodge,! whose family tree portrays a typical course of frontier life. 
His ancestors made their first American appearance in early Mas- 
sachusetts, and passed through years of residence in Rhode Island 
and then Connecticut. His father served in the Revolution, was 
wounded at the Brandywine, married the daughter of a Scotch- 
Irish settler at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, took up his residence at 
Kaskaskia where his brother was Indian agent, and moved with 
the infant Henry to Ste. Genevieve in the lead mining district of 
the Spanish province of Upper Louisiana. The purchase of Louis- 
iana brought the Dodges back into the United States and Henry, 
now a strapping man, was of the sort that could thrash nine grand 
jurors for presuming to indict him for near-participation in Burr’s 
conspiracy. The War of 1812 brought to Henry Dodge military 
duty and the rank of colonel. He sat in the convention that made 
a constitution for Missouri, and in 1827 was attracted by the repu- 
tation of the Illinois lead mines to ascend the Mississippi and to 
establish himself in what was soon to become Iowa County, Michi- 
gan Territory, near the present town of Dodgeville. The Indian 
agent wrote of him that he lived “‘in a small stockade fort near the 
principal mine. There are about twenty log houses in the immedi- 
ate vicinity, besides several more remote. He has a double furnace 
in constant operation, and a large quantity of lead in bars and in 
the crude state.”’ He resided there in calm defiance of the law, 
shipped his lead to New Orleans, and bought a generous estate 
when the Indian lands came finally upon the market. More than 
any other he personified the Upper Mississippi Valley from 1827 
to 1850. He was a vigorous Unionist in 1832, decrying the right of 
any State to nullify a law of Congress; yet saw no inconsistency in 
his own refusal to obey the law. 

The lesser immigrants, who followed Henry Dodge, came more 
numerously to the northern counties of Illinois, and were soon at 
outs with the Sauk and Fox Indians. The unfortunate treaty of 
St. Louis, signed in 1804, was at the root of the misfortunes that 
this tribe underwent. In this treaty, the east bank of the Missis- 
sippi, between the Wisconsin and the Illinois, was ceded to the 
United States subject to the right of the Sauk and Fox to continue 
to occupy it until the United States should sell it. No squatter 
had any right here against the Indians; but the large acreage of 


1 The archives of the upper Mississippi Valley have been combed for papers relating to 
this border hero, and the results are well displayed in Louis Pelzer, Henry Dodge (1911), 
end Marches of the Dragoons in the Mississippi Valley (1917). ’ 


THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BOOM 289 


cleared ground around the Sauk and Fox village at Rock Island 
was a constant temptation to the more adventurous of the pro- 
spectors. The double lure of lead and the Illinois prairies brought 
them in and during the summers of 1830 and 1831 they squatted 
upon the cornfields of the Indians. 

The Indians resented this encroachment, as was their right, and 

Black Hawk, their principal brave, blustered at the settlers and 
threatened to put them out by force. The squatters made as strong 
an appeal to the governor of Illinois and the commander of the 
United States garrison at Rock Island as though they were the 
injured parties, instead of rank trespassers. In 1831 General 
Gaines forced Black Hawk to promise to stay west of the Missis- 
sippi, and leave the whites alone. But in April, 1832, Black Hawk 
was back again, crossing the river with a body of warriors esti- 
mated at between six and eight hundred.? There was panic in the 
lead country, and among the frontier farms of Illinois; but Henry 
Dodge held the Winnebago in check, preventing them from joining 
Black Hawk in a vain attempt to block the course of history. The 
Iilinois militia was called out by Governor Reynolds, and General 
Atkinson brought his regulars from Fort Armstrong to a rendez- 
vous at Dixon’s early in May. Here the road from Chicago to 
the lead mines crossed the Rock River, and along this road were 
pouring the settlers from central Illinois and Indiana who were 
coming overland in wagons to the new country. In July General 
Winfield Scott arrived at Chicago with regulars from the East, 
including the cadet corps from West Point that was hurriedly 
sent to the defense of the frontier. 

The frontier politicians who served with the Illinois militia in 
1832 continued long to talk about their experiences, as though the 
campaign had been a war. Black Hawk lost his belligerent desires 
as soon as he saw a force raised against him, and retreated in haste. 
His direct line back to the Mississippi was cut off, so he ascended 
the Rock River, making a long detour through northern Illinois 
and southern Wisconsin, as he hurried to the rough land along the 
Wisconsin River near the Dells. The pursuers followed, not too 
closely. They conducted a running engagement through the Four 
Lakes district where Madison was later built, and drove him down 


Ff. E. Stevens, The Black Hawk War (1903), is a careful antiquarian study; the local 
historians of Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin have conserved the last verifiable 
details of this inglorious campaign. J. Reynolds, My Own Times (1879). The famous auto- 
biography of Black Hawk, first published in 1833, is now available in M. M. Quaife, Life of 
Black Hawk, Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (1916). 


290 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


to the Mississippi bank. On August 2, while Black Hawk and his 
discouraged warriors were crossing the river to the Jowa side, they 
were set upon, shot, drowned, and captured; and the chief himself 
was handed over to the army after he sought refuge with the 
Winnebago. In September what was left of the Sauk and Fox con- 
cluded a treaty of submission and cession, in which they agreed to 
stay west of the Mississippi and surrender a strip along the right 
bank of that river some fifty miles in width. The Black Hawk 
cession, as this was called, was the first title acquired by the United 
States in Iowa. 

The peaceful Indian possession of the Upper Mississippi that 
was in force in 1825 was gone by 1832. The new equilibrium to be 
established was worked out in recognition of new territories to be 
formed north of Illinois and Missouri. The Sauk and Fox, who 
were construed to be the aggressors, were punished by the loss of 
their home. The Winnebago and the Potawatami were induced to 
follow them beyond the Mississippi. 

The Winnebago met General Scott and Governor Reynolds in 
treaty council at Fort Armstrong in September, 1832. General 
Dodge was there, as friend of the tribe, for they had not resented 
his residence among them. They agreed to leave the country east 
of the Mississippi and to accept for temporary residence a tract 
between the Sioux and the Sauk and Fox, on the west bank, along 
the neutral strip that had been established between these ancient 
enemies after the Prairie du Chien negotiations of 1825. The 
Potawatami and their relatives from the Ottawa and Chippewa 
tribes were convened in a council at Chicago a year later. ‘They 
had earlier than this reduced their claims to a strip extending along 
the western shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago to the vicinity 
of Milwaukee. They now accepted a substitute reserve west of 
the Sauk and Fox in the Iowa country and became emigrant 
Indians to the new frontier. Ten years later after they were in 
residence along the east side of the Missouri, in former Omaha 
country, their agent commented upon the rapidity of shift: ‘“Al- 
though it is but ten years to-day since that treaty was concluded 
... the tide of emigration has rolled onwards to the far West, until 
the whites are now crowded closely on the southern side of these 
lands, and will soon swarm along the eastern side, to exhibit the 
very worst traits of the white man’s character, and destroy, by 
fraud and illicit intercourse, the remnant of a powerful people, 
now exposed to their influence.” 


THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BOOM 291 


With the Indians removed from the space between Lake Michi- 
gan and the Mississippi, and with the General Land Office ready 
to run township lines and to open the new lands for sale, the time 
came for the development of the Upper Mississippi Valley. The 
spring of 1833 beheld a rapid flow of population along the three 
routes that led to northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and the 
Black Hawk Purchase. Squatters were at the Mississippi long 
before the country beyond it was ready for their use and the army 
had a vexatious task in ejecting those who could not wait for the 
appointed day. The difficulty of administering the land laws, 
which provided that there could not be any legal entry upon the 
lands until after they had been surveyed and offered formally for 
sale, was increased by a growing habit on the part of Congress of 
allowing preémption rights. The theory of preémption was that 
certain individuals already in occupation of parts of the public 
domain when the surveys were made had an equity in their im- 
provements that entitled them to protection. Congress granted 
this, by special act, allowing such occupiers to buy their land at 
the minimum price in advance of the general sale. Hence the word 
*““preémption’’; and hence the impossibility of holding back the 
general rush of settlers until the advertised date, when it was com- 
mon knowledge that others, who had pushed in through the 
guards, would be allowed to profit by their law breaking. The 
Black Hawk Purchase was occupied in the summer of 1833, al- 
though it had as yet no government and the settlers’ only guar- 
antee of order was their own good sense. 

Keokuk, Burlington, Davenport, and Dubuque, all of them 
river towns, were quickly born along the Black Hawk Purchase 
and developed hopes of future greatness that time could not fulfill. 
They were paralleled, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, by 
Chicago, Southport (Kenosha), Milwaukee, and Manitowoc, each 
of which saw itself as a connecting link between the fleet of lake 
steamers and the new towns and farms that were multiplying 
every spring. The Jacksonian migration was approaching its crest 
in the years after the Black Hawk War and these hopeful towns 
were the most remote of its disturbances. 

Michigan Territory, enlarged after the admission of Illinois, ex- 
tended from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Mississippi, 
without much population in either of its detached portions until 
after 1825. It established county government for the lead country 
in its extreme western end before 1830 and was itself enlarged 


292 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


after the Black Hawk cession. The new boundaries were designed 
to be temporary; but for the present they carried the jurisdiction | 
of the territory as far west as the Missouri River and as far south 
as the northern boundary of the State of Missouri. Most of the 
new area was Indian Country, under the protection of the Indian 
Intercourse Act that was passed two days after the Michigan en- 
largement. It was as yet uncertain where the balance would be 
established between the Indians and the whites along the northern 
section of the frontier, and meanwhile some form of government 
for the settlers west of the Mississippi could not be avoided. Michi- 
gan promptly created two counties, Dubuque and Des Moines, 
separated by a line drawn west from Rock Island, and thus 
allowed the first Iowa residents to work out their own destinies. 

The statehood movement in Michigan gave the terminal date 
at which the extension of its area must cease, and Congress took 
up at the same time the admission of Michigan and the organiza- 
tion of a new Mississippi Valley territory. There had been agita- 
tion for a division of Michigan for several years, led by Morgan L. 
Martin, a New York emigrant residing at Green Bay, and George 
W. Jones, of the lead region, who was Michigan territorial delegate 
in Congress in 1836. The territory of Wisconsin was the result of 
their activity, created in the spring of 1836, and including all of 
Michigan Territory outside the boundaries established for the 
State of Michigan, thus extending from Lake Michigan to the 
Missouri River. Henry Dodge, of Mineral Point, was appointed 
governor by President Jackson, and speedily convened his first 
legislative council at the village of Belmont in Iowa County. 
There were six counties in his original domain, two west of the 
Mississippi and four east. His territorial census found 10,531 in- 
habitants west of the river, and 11,683 on the eastern side. The 
local news was cared for by the Belmont Gazette and the Dubuque 
Visitor, while local finance was made more chaotic by the incor- 
poration of the Miners’ Bank to operate at Dubuque. 

As soon as Wisconsin Territory was launched * it became appar- 
ent that its form was temporary, and that the flow of emigration 
would speedily procure its division into at least two common- 
wealths. The routes leading up the Mississippi were shorter and 
more direct than those around the lakes, and the southwest por- 
tion of the territory was growing more rapidly than the eastern. 


? Moses M. Strong, History of the Territory of Wisconsin, from 1836 to 1848 (1885), is al- 
most an autobiography. 


THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BOOM 203 


The first legislative council appreciated this and established a seat 
of government near the geographical center of the eastern section 
of the territory, finding a name for it in that of the venerable 
Madison, who died in the summer of 1836. Two years later Con- 
gress recognized the trend of events and created the Territory of 
Iowa, comprising the portion of Wisconsin west of the Mississippi. 
There was southern opposition to the creation of additional north- 
ern territories that were likely to be free and to threaten the bal- 
ance of power in the Senate; but George W. Jones, who had now 
become sponsor for Iowa, and who was in Congress as the Wiscon- 
sin delegate, appears to have caught the southern leaders napping. 
In the territorial census of 1838 there were shown to be 22,859 
‘inhabitants in Iowa and 18,189 in Wisconsin; the former in a 
compact body along the Mississippi, the latter in two flourishing 
and rival sections, one on Lake Michigan and one on the Missis- 
sippi. There has been no moment since 1838 when the politics of 
Wisconsin have not depended upon the balance of these two 
sections. 

The northern section of the Indian frontier was worked out dur- 
ing the early stages of the organization of the upper Mississippi 
territories. Since the beginning of the century it had been the 
scene of the great activities of the fur traders. First the British 
and then the American companies had established their factories 
and trafficked with the Indians between the lakes and the Mis- 
souri. Pike found traders at St. Paul, and Lewis and Clark found 
them at the Mandan villages. After 1819, the United States post 
at Fort Snelling was the center of trading, and for nearly twenty 
years the traders had no rivals, until in 1837 Governor Dodge, and 
the Indian agent at Fort Snelling, Taliaferro, convened the Chip- 
pewa and the Sioux for a new adjustment. Two treaties, concluded 
that autumn, opened much of northern Wisconsin to white entry. 
The Chippewa receded east and north, towards Lake Superior, 
surrendering the timberlands of the Wisconsin Valley. The Sioux 
ceded what claims they had left east of the Mississippi, most im- 
portant of which was the rich pine country of the St. Croix Valley. 
The farmer was slow in following the retiring Indians north of a 
line drawn from Fort Winnebago to Fort Snelling, but the lumber- 
men rushed in to establish a new frontier of their own and to lay 
the foundations of the first large private fortunes that the far 
Northwest produced. Down the St. Croix, the Chippewa, and the 
Wisconsin to the Mississippi, down the Mississippi to the eager 


294 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


buyers in the prairie States, the logs were floated every spring. 
After 1837 the northern section of the Indian frontier was stable 
for a decade, with two new territories nestling in between it and 
the frontier States. 


CHAPTER XXXIII 
THE BORDER STATES: MICHIGAN AND ARKANSAS 


“THE great rage even here in this part of Ohio is to sell & go 
West!” wrote an intelligent young teacher from Carthage, Ohio, 
early in 1837. Carthage was only a few miles north of Cincinnati, 
on the line of the canal to Dayton, and in a region that expected 
much from the internal improvements that were under way. But 
the Jacksonian migration was at its height, and the stories of suc- 
cessful development and speculation set in motion not only the 
social elements that were normally relied upon for the outfitting 
of new frontiers, but many of the staid and settled members of 
society. The migration picked up its people everywhere. ‘There 
were Yankees from tidewater who moved with it to the extreme 
borders of the West; there were southerners from the coastal plain 
who found their way to Missouri or to Texas. No one has 
estimated how large a percentage of the whole American popula- 
tion was swept from its moorings by either the hope of improve- 
ment in a new location, or the positive discomforts of the old. 
The great migration was shaped by strong incentives to shift out 
of the East. In the Jacksonian migration the attractiveness of the 
West was the impelling force. In this, as in the earlier movement, 
the through migrant was the exception; the typical one was seized 
by the current where he happened to be, and was carried only a 
short distance towards the actual border. The heaviest contribu- 
tion of the current was deposited in the parts of the West that 
already had the most population, while the most apparent was on 
the edge where every cabin stood out sharply against the back- 
ground of loneliness. 

The 6,300,000 inhabitants of the western States in 1840 included, 
as has been seen, over 4,100,000 who were new since 1820, and 
introduced new strains and stresses in the system of American 
politics because the newer elements were not spread over the 
country in the same proportions as the old. In 1820, Kentucky 
and Tennessee, the oldest West, boasted 980,000 inhabitants, and 
had a safe ascendency over the northwest and southwest neighbor- 
ing groups. The northwest group, colonized largely through or 
out of Kentucky, included the three States, Ohio, Indiana, [llinois, 


296 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


and the territories of Michigan and Missouri, and comprised 
840,000. The southwest group included the States of Alabama, © 
Mississippi, and Louisiana, and the new territory of Arkansas, and 
had reached a total of 354,000. 

The Kentucky-Tennessee ascendency was gone in 1830, for al- 
though the region had received a healthy increment in numbers, 
advancing to 1,370,000, the northwest neighbors had grown to 
1,590,000. The southwest group, with the plantation now direct- 
ing the course of its economic development, reached 670,000 at the 
same time. In ten years more, the ascendency was still further dis- 
turbed, for the plantation country grew to 1,400,000 whereas Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee had attained only 1,610,000. The old West 
was still growing with more than average rapidity, but it could not 
hold the pace with the abnormal increases of its younger rivals. 
The northwest group in 1840 was not only far ahead of the old 
West, but was as weighty as the old West and the plantation West 
combined, counting 3,330,000 inhabitants at the census. In all 
three areas the usual forces of development were intensified; the 
northwest group of States had additional contributions from the 
northern sources of immigration which had hitherto been less than 
fully developed. The Erie Canal made possible the New England 
and New York outpouring over the West. 

The western sectional balance of 1840 shows that the West was 
less solid than it had been when Jackson was elected, and much 
less so than in 1800. The preponderance in numbers of the country 
north of the Ohio River over its more southern neighbors fore- 
shadowed what the next two decades were to bring about: —a 
preponderance within the Northwest of the northern strains 
among its population. For the purpose of this tabulation Missouri 
has been counted among the States northwest of Kentucky. H, 
however, its 383,000 inhabitants of 1840 should be subtracted from 
the Northwest and added to either of the other sections, the dis- 
crepancy in growth, though lessened, would still be everwhelming. 

The creation of Iowa and Wisconsin Territories marks the ex- 
tension of the Jacksonian wave of settlement into the most north- 
west corner of the United States. Michigan, which became a State 
in 1837, rose in population from 8000 in 1820, to 31,000 in 1830, 
and 212,000 in 1840. Indiana and Illinois each increased by more 
than the total Michigan population in the single decade closing ir 
1840, and Ohio increased nearly thrice as much. But these were 
already States, and the influx though disturbing did not yet upset. 


THE BORDER STATES 297 


society or politics. In the Territory of Michigan the invasion 
brought about a completely new alignment. 

The roots of the white occupation of Michigan were thrust 
among the Indian inhabitants during the sixteenth century, when 
the fur trade began to attract the speculators of New France. By 
the eighteenth century the portages and the other strategic 
points were known, and Cadillac soon planted his station at the 
narrows between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair. Detroit became 
a natural sentinel over the traffic between the lakes, although 
much of the business evaded it by following the canoe route further 
north, by way of Georgian Bay and Lake Nipissing. The French, 
and then the English, made their station at Detroit, not with an 
eye for settlement but to dominate the fur trade. When England 
surrendered the frontier posts after Jay’s Treaty, the business of 
Detroit was too valuable to be sacrificed, and at Malden, across 
the river and a little below it, a new agency was developed. Hither 
came the Indians from the Wabash and further south; and here 
was the objective of Hull’s forlorn campaign of 1812. 

Not until 1805 were the dispersed inhabitants on the upper lakes 
numerous enough to warrant a separate territory; but in this year 
Michigan was set apart.! Detroit was its seat of government, but 
few of its people ever visited it, for they were spread as far north 
as the outlets of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, and lived the 
mixed life of backwoodsmen. Few of them were without some 
admixture of French blood, and as a whole they constituted the 
residuum of generations of fur traders rather than the advance of 
farming pioneers. ‘There was a belief that died hard that the land 
was unfit for farming. In the north were great forests that had as 
yet no market. The extensive areas of swamp were overwhelming 
in the discouragement they imposed upon the prospector. But 
more influential in retarding advance until after 1825 was the 
absence of any developed thoroughfare from a settled region of 
the United States to Michigan. When Hull was ordered to hold 
Detroit and to take Canada, his army broke its own road through 
the untrod wilderness, as Braddock and Forbes had done in reach- 
ing the Ohio forks. 

There were only eight thousand inhabitants in Michigan in 


1 George N. Fuller, Economic and Social Beginnings of Michigan (1916), is useful. The 
Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society Collections began to accumulate volumes, some- 
what indiscriminate for many years, in 1874. The great local collections of materials are 
those of Clarence M. Burton, in Detroit, and of William L. Clements, now a treasured 
possession of the University of Michigan. 


298 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


1820, although some premonitions of change were visible. The 
area of the territory had been extended in 1818 by the addition of © 
the remnant of the Old Northwest outside Illinois. Green Bay and 
Prairie du Chien were ancient communities, but they added little 
population to the backwoods eddy. More significant than their 
addition was the appearance, in 1817, of Walk in the Water, 
the first steamboat on the waters of Lake Erie. The Erie Canal 
was begun in this year and steadily thereafter the number of ad- 
venturous speculators increased to take advantage of events. 
Buffalo, Cleveland, Sandusky, and Toledo made a prompt appear- 
ance and development; and at Detroit there were new settlers who 
anticipated a boom period for Michigan. Congress allowed a ter- 
ritorial delegate to Michigan m 1819, and in the next decade the 
legislature organized the lower tier of counties to receive the in- 
coming settlers. 

Although there were only 31,639 settlers in Michigan in 1830, 
the number was growing so rapidly that in 1834 a territorial census 
enumerated 87,273, and the legislative council prepared to agitate 
for statehood. There was no enabling act by Congress, but the 
enterprising legislators read the Ordinance of 1787 for themselves 
and asserted that they had an unalterable right to form a consti- 
tution and State government when they possessed 60,000 free 
inhabitants. The territory accordingly enabled itself, without 
waiting for Congress to act, and in May, 1835, a convention 
assembled at Detroit. Of the eighty-nine members of the Michi- 
gan constitutional convention, fifty-two were originally from New 
England or the Middle States, and eighteen had passed the forma- 
tive period of their manhood in New York. The constitution that 
they framed seems to have been written in the belief that the good 
times of the boom period were to last forever. The restrictive pro- 
visions of the western constitutions of the next fifteen years are 
lacking in the Michigan document. It provided that men should 
qualify for the franchise on a short term of residence, and that the 
legislature should insure prosperity by encouragement of internal 
improvement schemes. It claimed for Michigan the boundary 
stated in the Ordinance of 1787. 

The adherence of Michigan to a southern boundary along a line 
drawn due east from the southern tip of Lake Michigan stirred up 
the only serious obstruction to its admittance.? So far as the South 


2 Annah M. Soule, “‘Southern and Western Boundaries of Michigan,” and ‘The Michi- 
gan-Indiana Boundary,”’ in Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society Collections, vol. xxvu. 


ve "\etematg 


THE BORDER STATES 299 


was concerned there was no strong resistance, for Arkansas Terri- 
tory was far enough along to be paired with the northern State. 
But Ohio was in guilty possession of a tract that Congress had 
assigned to Michigan in the Ordinance of 1787, and was able to 
prevent its entrance except on terms that were acceptable to itself. 
Indiana had been granted by Congress a strip ten miles wide 
north of the Ordinance line, and Ohio had claimed a wedge-shaped 
tract south of the north cape of the mouth of the Maumee River. 
Neither Ohio nor Indiana would yield anything to Michigan, in 
spite of the unalterability of the Ordinance, and in spite of the 
threat Michigan made by calling out the militia to protect the 
territory. 

~ The influence of Ohio upon Congress and the national Adminis- 
tration was greater than usual in 1836, for a presidential election 
was Impending, and Jackson was more than anxious to secure the 
choice of his friend and protégé, Martin Van Buren. The success 
_ of this scheme was threatened by an opposition plan to name local 
worthies whose combined strength might be enough to keep Van 
Buren’s electoral vote down below a majority of the electoral col- 
lege. Hugh L. White, of Jackson’s own State was in the field, and 
William Henry Harrison of Ohio. Jt was no time for Jackson men 
to run an unnecessary risk of losing the vote of Ohio by despoiling 
that State of the piece of Michigan that it had seized. In June, 
1836, Michigan was authorized to become a State, under the De- 
troit constitution, after accepting the unavoidable boundaries of 
Indiana and of Ohio, the latter now receiving its first legal sanc- 
tion. Whatever politics was included in the vote was vain, for 
Harrison carried Ohio by a majority of over eight thousand. But 
Michigan lost its share of the eternal compact of 1787, and, what 
was more concrete, the harbor at Toledo and the terminus of the 
Wabash and Miami canals. A convention held at Ann Arbor, 
Michigan, in September, rejected the terms of this conditional 
admission; but in December another though illegal convention 
thought better of the refusal and accepted the inevitable. Michi- 
gan became the twenty-sixth State in the Union in January, 1837, 
having been delayed behind Arkansas by the wrangle over the 
Toledo strip. 

Arkansas Territory, like Michigan, was in an eddy, and was 
reached by a current of population only when that current rose 
above its usual banks. The part of the Mississippi River that 
washes its eastern border was quite as remote from the standpoint 


800 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


of settlement as the Upper Mississippi around the lead mines. 
Kither way population approached, Arkansas was a long way off. 
For the settler floating down the Ohio and Mississippi in his ark, 
there was no need to go as far as Arkansas. There was ever an 
abundance of fertile soil on the Ohio, or in Missouri. ‘The stream 
of settlers was soaked up before it reached Arkansas Post at the 
mouth of the Arkansas River. Similarly, the migrant through New 
Orleans who sought unimproved territory, had to fight his way 
past the attractions of the black soil of Mississippi and Louisiana, 
and to work his way against a stubborn current before he could 
reach Arkansas. There was no territory of the name of Arkansas 
before 1819, and no need for one. The creation of Arkansas in that 
year was more for the relief of Missouri which was too straggling, 
than because the group of residents in the Arkansas Valley was of 
importance.’ 

In its original form Arkansas Territory extended from the Mis- 
sissipp1 to the western boundary of the United States at the one 
hundredth meridian, between the State of Louisiana and the Terri- 
tory of Missouri. There were Indian tribes in its western half, and 
Congress had intended to put more there. Not until 1828 was the 
western boundary of what was to be the new State worked out. 
After this time Arkansas was bounded on the west by the Choc- 
taw from the Arkansas River at Fort Smith to the Red River, 
and by the Cherokee from Fort Smith north to the southwest 
corner of Missouri. It was the only State whose limit of extension 
was determined by Indian rights. 

The social penetration of Arkansas followed, for most part, the 
course of the river up to the Indian Country, although Congress 
between 1821 and 1833 marked a military road from Memphis to 
Little Rock. The Arkansas River was full of obstructions in the 
form of timber washed downstream, and it was a long time before 
these were removed. American ingenuity, developed in this task 
of removing snags from navigable rivers, attracted much attention 
during the thirties, and the name of Henry M. Shreve became 
widely known because of his success in designing a snag boat. The 
removal of the great “‘raft’’ of the Red River that had ever im- 
peded the development of northwest Louisiana, was his work, and 
under his direction the Arkansas was cleared. 

The spontaneous ripening of Michigan into statehood was fol- 


* J. H. Reynolds, ‘“‘Western Boundary of Arkansas,’ in Arkansas Historical Society 
Publications, vol. 1, summarizes the history of one of the most elusive boundary lines. 


THE BORDER STATES 301 


lowed by similar development in Arkansas, although the popula- 
tion was growing much less rapidly in the latter territory. A con- 
stitutional convention for the territory met in the Baptist meeting 
house at Little Rock in January, 1836, on the call of the legislature 
and without authorization by Congress. The Michigan congress- 
men-elect were already in Washington, urging the acceptance of 
the new constitution recently framed at Detroit and approved by 
the people. The Arkansas members used in their deliberation the 
recent southwest constitutions, notably those of Alabama, Missis- 
sippi, and Tennessee, as well as that framed in Virginia in 1829, 
from which they took most of the bill of rights. In both Missis- 
sippi and Tennessee the constitutions in force were recent revisions 
made necessary by the shifting population and rapid growth of the 
Jacksonian migration in these States. In spite of the fact that the 
other southern conventions had been following the precedent of 
Mississippi, which submitted its constitution to ratification in 
1819, the Arkansas delegates signed their frame of government 
when they were satisfied with it, and declared it in force by pro- 
mulgation. | 

The appearance of the Arkansas constitution in the spring of 
1836, while Congress was deliberating over that of Michigan, 
made it possible to link these territories as Maine and Missouri 
had been joined, as Illinois and Alabama, and as Indiana and 
Mississippi. Indeed since the admission of Louisiana, in 1812, 
there had not been a single State admitted entirely upon its own 
merits. The rise of an affirmative slavery propaganda threw an 
emphasis upon the southern desirability of maintaining a balance 
of slave and free States in the United States Senate. Louisiana 
was the eighteenth State, and made the ninth in which slavery was 
to be a permanent institution. Thereafter the force of sectionalism 
was so great that no State either slave or free could be admitted 
unless it was accompanied by a companion State of the other type. 
The Michigan-Arkansas pair of 1836 was followed in the next dec- 
ade by Iowa-Florida and Texas-Wisconsin. After Wisconsin there 
was no further territory available for the manufacture of slave 
States except in the Southwest that had been conquered from 
Mexico, and the South in the middle of the century set about to 
procure the repeal of the restrictive provisions of the Missouri 
Compromise. There is much reason to believe that slave labor, as 
the basis of an industrial system, had spent its force before 1860, 
but the momentum of the machine that had been erected upon it 


302 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


after 1812 was sufficient to propel the South into the disastrous 
attempt to secede in order to safeguard it. The sectional deviation 
that is revealed by the census of 1840, and the uneven develop- 
ment of the West, widened the split between the interests of slavery 
and free labor, and made it impossible for the former to win the 
Civil War. 

In June, 1836, Congress authorized the admission of Arkansas 
and Michigan, under the constitutions of their choice, with the 
restriction upon the latter concerning its southern boundary. The 
law was ineffective upon Michigan until January 26, 1837. Ar- 
kansas, on the contrary, came in at once, and was able to cast its 
electoral vote for the presidential candidate of Jackson’s choice. 
Van Buren was the choice of two thirds of its voters. The popula- 
tion of Arkansas in 1840 was 97,574; that of Michigan was 212,267. 


CHAPTER XXXIV 
THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF TEXAS 


Tue deliberate attempt of the leaders of the southern political 
machine to safeguard and conserve the institution of slavery, has 
been a subject for repeated attack and criticism from northern 
historians. It was indeed a disturbing element in the politics of 
the nineteenth century, but it was by no means the only force that 
tended to give shape to party controversy. The abolitionist his- 
torians, and the great learning of Hermann von Holst, gave wide 
currency to the idea that the settlement of Texas was an organic 
part of the pro-slavery attempt, and that both the creation and 
the annexation of Texas were to be regarded as parts of a gigantic 
- conspiracy of slaveholders. Since the publication of the Constv- 
tutional History of von Holst, materials have come from the ar- 
chives of the independent State of Texas that bear a different 
testimony. The studies of Garrison, Barker, Rives, and Justin H. 
Smith make it possible to reconstruct the Texas story, and to show 
it not as a conspiracy but as a normal fragment of the Jacksonian 
migration.! The fact that the land of Texas happened to be owned 
by a foreign nation no longer conceals the other fact that the so- 
cial laws determining the extension of the frontier applied to the 
whole expanse of the western border, south as well as north. The 
remote consequences of this wave of population are to be found 
upon social “beaches” in the Upper Mississippi Valley, where 
Wisconsin and Jowa took shape, and on the coast of the Gulf of 
Mexico, along the line of the Spanish road from San Antonio to 
Nacogdoches, where Texas became important. Texas and Wiscon- 
sin were equally the consequence of the westward movement. 
Until about the time of the Mexican revolution in 1821 there 
was no appreciable pressure of the American agricultural frontier 
upon the Texas boundary. The northern extension of New Spain 
had stopped, so far as its own driving force was concerned, before 
1 George P. Garrison, Teras (1903); Justin H. Smith, Annexation of Texas (1911); George 
L. Rives, The United States and Mexico, 1821-48 (1913); Eugene C. Barker, the worthy 
successor of Garrison in the University of Texas, has traversed the whole early history of the 
State in the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Society, now continued as the South- 


western Historical Quarterly. Garrison, and his pupils, Barker and Bolton, founded a dis- 
tinctive school of investigators of southwestern history. 


804 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


it reached the Sabine River. In the latter part of the seventeenth 
century, when Marquette, Joliet, and La Salle were establishing 
French claims to the Lower Mississippi, the Spanish rulers at- 
tempted to make a foothold in the same region. They appreciated 
that this was to be a frontier of empire. They occupied eastern 
Texas and established various missions among the Indians, but 
found it necessary to abandon most of them. At the northwest 
corner of the State of Louisiana, where the Red and Sabine rivers 
approach each other, their military frontier established itself de 
facto. The French built a post at Natchitoches in 1713. The 
Spanish were entrenched some years earlier than this on the Rio 
Grande, at San Juan Bautista, near Eagle Pass; and in 1718 they 
advanced to San Antonio and there constructed a town, a pre- 
sidio, and a mission. The Spanish road from Eagle Pass, through 
San Antonio, to the Red River at Natchitoches, became a great 
highway for the priests and soldiers upon whom Spain relied to 
hold her empire. There were numerous missions and forts that 
were shifted from place to place as the exigencies of Indian and 
French warfare required, and at the upper end of the road, around 
Nacogdoches, on a branch of the Rio Neches, Spain kept a per- 
manent guard.? 

The transfer of Louisiana to Spain, in 1762, was accepted by 
that country with some reluctance. Spain gained little satisfaction 
and no profit from the new province except that Spanish control 
at New Orleans made it possible to relax the frontier garrisons of 
Texas. When the period of Spanish rule of Louisiana ended in 
1803, Natchitoches was revived as an outpost, and the Spanish 
military authorities in Mexico proceeded to restore their control 
of the road to San Antonio. But there were few Americans en 
route to ‘Texas who had to be turned back. 

The few instances of border contacts between the United States 
and Spain before 1819 indicate the trifling importance of the 
boundary. Many of them had to do with the fixed or movable 
property of the Red River Valley. Burr gave it out, as one of his 
explanations, that he expected to take up land grants along the 
Red. Upon the plains bordering this river there were large herds 
of cattle and wild horses, the former valuable for their hides, the 


* Herbert Eugene Bolton, after bringing out his Guide to the Materials for United States 
History in the Archives of Mexico (1913), produced in quick succession Athanese de Meziéres 
(1914), and Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century (1915), both books giving new meaning 
to the Texas-Louisiana border. 


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THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF TEXAS 305 


latter for purposes of trade. The vagrant hunter and the horse 
thief were unwelcome visitors on the Spanish side of the line, and 
occasional adventurers were killed in fights or executed after trial 
by the Spanish authorities. In 1811 a band of traders tried to take 
a train of pack mules to Santa Fé, but were inhospitably received 
and jailed. In 1819 an American named Long proceeded from 
Natchez to Nacogdoches to bring about the independence of 
Texas; but his provisional government had no success and he was 
driven out by the Spanish royalists. In 1821 Mexico became in- 
dependent of Spain and the occupied American frontier reached 
the State of Missouri. From this date the American border was 
close enough to make trade interesting, and the Spanish or Mexican 
reluctance to allow contacts disappeared. 

Towards the end of the great migration the first steps were taken 
to bring the cotton lands of Texas within range of the pioneers of 
the Southwest. Mississippi had become a State in 1817, Alabama 
in 1819, settlers were flooding Louisiana and working their clear- 
ings up the Red River, and one Moses Austin of Missouri Terri- 
tory undertook a speculation in Spanish land titles. 

The life of Moses Austin was as typical of the frontier as was 
that of Henry Dodge. He was born in Durham, Connecticut, mar- 
ried a wife in Philadelphia, learned to be a miner in Virginia, and 
migrated to the lead mines of Upper Louisiana while Spain was 
still in control of them. Here he became naturalized as a Spanish 
subject, only to have his nationality changed by the retrocession 
and sale of Louisiana. In 1803 he was once more an American citi- 
zen, with a special knowledge of the Spanish provinces. When the 
advance guard of the Ohio Valley migrants reached Missouri, 
he looked ahead into Texas as a field for profitable speculation. 

In 1820 Moses Austin was at San Antonio persuading the Span- 
ish authorities to allow him to import American settlers to a tract 
between the San Antonio road and Galveston Bay. He was suc- 
cessful, but died before the patent was issued; and his son, Stephen, 
took up the task he dropped.? The Mexican revolution intervened 
and the royalist grant prepared for Stephen Austin required con- 
firmation by the native government of Iturbide before it acquired 
validity. When Iturbide’s short-lived empire was overthrown, the 
congress of the republic issued a second confirmation. In 1825 the 
legislature of the Mexican state of Texas and Coahuila passed a 


* The Austin papers, edited by Eugene C. Barker, are in process of publication by the 
American Historical Association. 


306 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


general colonization law, and when the Jacksonian migration took 
shape there was an open highway leading to the Rio Grande. 
The Mexican experiment in colonization was ill-advised, but it 
is not certain whether this was due to the corruptibility of the 
Mexican rulers or to some fantastic notion that American colonies 
could be made to live happily among the inhabitants of Texas. 
The bulk of the native population of Mexico was, as it still is, com- 
posed of Indians of unmixed blood. The simple, easy-going, illit- 
erate lives of these had been little affected by centuries of Spanish 
occupation and control. They showed high powers of resistance 
to the forces of civilization and although they were in many re- 
gions controlled in worldly as well as spiritual affairs by the priests 
at the missions, they developed little independent spiritual or 
economic life. There were also many half breeds, mestizos or 
mulattoes according as the mixture was Indian or black; and there 
was a small minority of white persons of Castilian blood. By 1821 
the currents of emigration had slowed down and most of the 
Spanish in Mexico were born there, and some of them took pride 
in the name of creole that was given them. The aristocracy was 
made up of these creoles and Spanish and included individuals of 
European education and large wealth. The young men of this class 
took readily to political intrigue and were widely ambitious of 
military glory. They lived by the management of the lower classes 
on their great ranches and plantations. The extensions of occupied 
territory had for centuries been made under government direction. 
There was no class in Mexico similar to the American frontiersmen 
or capable of doing their work in developing natural resources. 
Blind to the consequences of letting in the American frontiers- 
man, the local government continued the policy of making grants 
of land to promoters along the San Antonio road. The Govern- 
ment was resisting the overtures of the United States to buy a part 
of ‘Texas, yet used Americans to colonize the land in question. 
The British diplomatic representative in Mexico observed the 
trend of events, and as early as 1825 warned both the Mexican 
foreign office and his own. “They are suffering,” he said, “‘. . . by 
an absurd mixture of negligence, & weakness, the whole disputed 
territory ... to be quietly taken possession of by the very men, 
whose claim to it, they are resisting here. ... [The] whole of the 
lands between the rivers Sabine and Brazos, have been granted 
away to American settlers, and. . . the tide of emigration is settling 
very fast in the direction of the Rio Bravo... . On the most moder- 


THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF TEXAS , 307 


ate computation, six hundred North American families are already 
established in Texas; their numbers are increasing daily, and 
though they nominally recognize the authority of the Mexican 
government, a very little time will enable them, to set at defiance 


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any attempt to enforce it. . . . [The settlers are] American — Back- 
woodsmen, a bold and hardy race, but likely to prove bad subjects, 
and most inconvenient neighbors.” 

By 1830 the American colonists in Texas were perhaps twenty 
thousand in number. True to the general conditions of the migra- 
tion they came most numerously from the nearest settled regions, 
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Naturally they were 


308 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


southern by birth and education and among them were some few 
who had slaves in the United States and took them into Texas. A 
single good slave was often worth as much as a whole section of 
government land at the standard price of $1.25 an acre. But most 
of the Texas settlers expected their speculation to prosper and 
looked forward to the time when they might turn their small farms 
into large plantations, stock them with slaves, and join the aris- 
tocracy. Of necessity the Texas community was part and parcel 
of the American South. 

The Mexican enthusiasm for American colonists in Texas weak- 
ened about 1830 when a law was passed prohibiting further immi- 
gration. But Mexico had no administrative machinery capable of 
enforcing the law and the current was now too powerful to be re- 
sisted. The parents and grandparents of the new Texans had been 
too long accustomed to browbeat the Indians, to intrigue with 
Spanish officials, and to defy their own Government. Their rela- 
tives had elected Andrew Jackson in 1828, and like them they 
worshiped the ideas of democracy and home rule. The Mexican 
effort to stem the tide, and to prohibit slavery among them, was 
treated as their kinsmen in South Carolina were at the moment 
treating the laws of the United States. South Carolina in 1832 
made a gesture of nullification, led to it by the dogmatic teaching 
of Calhoun and his political school. Americans in Texas had even 
better grounds for declining to be swallowed up in a centralized 
government or to permit their institutions to be Latinized by 
Mexicans. 

The mental attitude of Stephen F. Austin is a fair summary of 
the status of Texas with reference to Mexico. The studies that 
Professor Barker has made in the Austin papers, which have been 
preserved in great abundance, indicate that from the issuance of 
his grant in 1821 until 1832 Austin was unswerving in his loyalty 
to the terms of the contract. He sought in good faith to bring in 
families of sound character, of Roman Catholic faith, and willing 
to take and observe oaths of loyalty to the country of their adop- 
tion. The spirit of separation that showed itself before 1832 in 
some of the other settlements of Americans in Texas did not 
spread into the Austin grant. 

Between 1832 and 1834 the spirit of Austin began to waver. 
Texas had been promised home rule, without receiving it. Instead, 
Texas was a part of a state of Coahuila and Texas, in which the 
Coahuila majority of natives might permanently overbalance the 


THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF TEXAS 309 


Americans living east of San Antonio. There arose a necessity for 
a separation of Texas from Coahuila, and its admission as a sepa- 
rate state in the Republic of Mexico. But this was denied by the 
Mexican congress, whose internal ructions threatened the existence 
of the federal principle in Mexico in any form. The Mexican civil 
war between Bustamente and Santa Anna imperiled the peace of 
the republic and forced the Texans to take sides. Since Santa 
Anna professed to be a constitutionalist, anxious to overthrow the 
principle of centralization, he gained the support of Texas. But 
when he was victorious, he revealed the insincerity of his profes- 
sions, and sought to make himself head of a centralized state. The 
autonomy of ‘l'exas was denied, its militia was cut down, and a 
military governor supplanted its legislature. Austin was in doubt 
until 1834. Then his mind cleared, as he saw that 'Fexas could not 
live in the Mexico of Santa Anna. After 1834 he worked for 
independence. 

The motives at work in favor of Texas independence were the 
frontier dislike of coercion, and an American fear of Mexicaniza- 
tion. In addition to these, there was a motive based on property 
rights. The earlier of the settlers had come in under legal Mexican 
grants, and received titles good under any Mexican law. Later 
arrivals speculated much in titles that were something less than 
perfect. There was ever a chance that a powerful Mexican Gov- 
ernment would annul many of the grants, and there were great 
areas of ungranted lands that would be at the disposal of an inde- 
pendent government in Texas. The whole American border was 
aflame with land speculation after 1833, and this homely motive 
played a considerable part in steadying Texans in a conclusion to 
separate which they might well have reached on other grounds. 

In October, 1835, Texas held a convention at Austin, and framed 
a constitution for itself. Michigan had just finished one; Arkansas 
was Just about to begin one. All were unauthorized, and found 
their origin in the spontaneous desires of frontier groups for auto- 
nomous government. The Texas convention faced the question 
whether to make a constitution for use within Mexico, or to work 
for independence, and decided in favor of the former alternative. 
But the course of the Mexican Government in the next few months 
was such that in March, 1836, another Texas convention adopted 
a declaration of independence. The conservatives were losing their 
hope of an agreement with Mexico, and the immediate immigrants 
were almost to a man for separation. The new constitution ac- 


310 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


cepted the common law as a basis for the criminal code, followed 
the structure of the United States Constitution where it was prac- 
ticable, and permitted the Spanish law of property to remain in 
force. 

The Mexican army and the Texas militia were already engaged 
in civil war when the declaration of independence was promul- 
gated. Santa Anna was in the field to preserve his realm. There 
was heavy fighting at San Antonio, where the Texas defenders took 
refuge in the Alamo, and where those who survived the engage- 
ment were murdered by the victorious Mexicans. Davy Crockett 
and James Bowie were among the slain, but their souls, like John 
Brown’s, went marching on. In April, 1836, General Sam Houston, 
who commanded the largest of the Texas forces, was attacked by 
Santa Anna on the San Jacinto River and completely dispersed the 
Mexicans. Santa Anna was captured as he fled, and under duress 
signed a treaty as president of Mexico recognizing the independ- 
ence of Texas and the territorial claim of that republic as far 
south as the Rio Grande. The Mexican congress repudiated his 
authority to do this, and the facts of occupation had given no war- 
rant for so extensive a region; but Texas never receded from its 
claim. 

The Territory of Wisconsin was created the day before the bat- 
tle of San Jacinto, and its people were no more certain of their 
Americanism than were those who won the freedom of Texas. 
Independence for ‘Texas was conceived as a first step to incorpora- 
tion in the United States. Texas agents were immediately sent to 
Washington to demand it, but found Jackson hesitant even to 
recognize the independence of the State. The election of 1836 was 
approaching, and there were already enough northern enemies of 
the Administration without arousing all the opponents of slavery 
who would see in Texas an attempt to build up the slave power. 
After the election of Van Buren it was still impossible to procure 
the admission of Texas. Formal recognition took place, and diplo- 
matic agents were exchanged, but Texas was obliged to bear itself 
as an independent republic until 1845. The Jacksonian wave of 
migration came to an end in 1837. An anti-Jackson party, the 
Whigs, rose to life and victory. And the necessities of slavery poli- 
tics determined the future of Texas. The financial collapse that 
visited the United States in 1837 temporarily diverted the thoughts 
of the country from speculation and growth to curtailment and 
recuperation. 


CHAPTER XXXV 
1837: THE PROSTRATE WEST 


Tue rage for emigration and speculation, and the high prices based 
upon an abundance of paper money, grew in intensity during the 
Jacksonian migration, producing an unbalanced economic life that 
could have no other end than financial collapse and general bank- 
ruptcy. But while the going was good, the tide of development 
flowed so fast that few could hope to stand against it. Over the 
whole West new villages appeared without forewarning, and 
former villages became cities at a single leap. What happened at 
Chicago was repeated elsewhere, on a similar scale. “Here,” 
wrote a careful reporter, “the rise in real property and the influx of 
migration are unexampled in the Western World. Lots in Town 
with small improvements are selling at from 10 to 150008, the right 
of preemption on qr. sec. of Land are worth from 8 to 10,0008. 
Several persons former citizens of ... [Parke County, Indiana, 
near Terre Haute] have become immensely wealthy merely by 
settling on a tract of Land & improving it sufficiently to hold the 
preemption, and money is a sure drug. Altho this looks incredible 
it is nevertheless true. The emigration to the northern part of 
Illinois is unprecedented. Whether this state of things can last 
long or not I can’t say, it seems hardly possible.”’ The craze that 
John G. Davis saw when he wrote this letter in 1835 was wider 
than he knew; but he did not overstate it.! 

Interlocked with the migration, stimulated by it, and itself an 
incentive to it, the internal improvements program of the western 
States reached full development at the same time. The source of 
the demand for internal improvements was the universal western 
conviction that there could not be solvency and prosperity with- 
out a market for the crops. ‘The Erie Canal was a powerful stimu- 
lant, and the open rivalry of the seaboard communities for western 
trade kept the idea alive. The Ohio Canal, first among the western 
works to reach completion, gave wide advertisement to western 
ambitions, and the other canals, undertaken about the same time, 
did not have to be argued in the West. The Black Hawk War 
gave publicity to Illinois and its neighborhood. The removals of 


1 The late J. G. D. Mack, of Madison, Wisconsin, generously made available the papers 
of his ancestor, John G. Davis, 


312 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Indian tribes towards their new frontier homes held the attention 
of the country. About 1832 the abnormal forces drawing emi- 
grants to the west became considerable, and in the following year 
they were reinforced by hard times in the Atlantic cities. 

The American State took upon itself a new character during the 
booming years of this period. Heretofore the people had been con- 
tent with a State that levied as few taxes as possible, and kept the 
courts open to litigants. Beyond its function as preserver of the 
peace, the State had few duties. The initiative in life was in the 
hands of the citizen, who disliked the suggestion of control. Public 
education had not yet built up a horde of salaried teachers. The 
militia was a go-as-you-please organization, without many military 
attributes. The revenues of government were not large enough to 
arouse cupidity or to make their control a matter of consequence. 
Politics were fought on personal issues and theories of government. 
The State was not in business. 

Chief among the influences that drove the American State into 
business was the American System of Henry Clay. Under his 
teaching the West accepted the doctrine that there must be im- 
proved routes of communication in order to provide access to 
markets. These roads called for money; yet not only was private 
capital lacking, but private capitalists were not accustomed to in- 
vestment in the stock of improvement companies. The legal side 
of such securities was yet inchoate. The powers of promoters, the 
control of corporations, the rights of the State with reference to 
corporations, the protection of the stockholders, were still to be 
worked out with pain, loss, and inconvenience to a multitude of 
innocent investors. Meanwhile, the works were needed. The 
United States, through its taxing system, might have become the 
source of the funds had not the strict constructionists interposed 
a barrier through Madison and Monroe. The States were the only 
other possible recourse, and when New York led off with the build- 
ing of the Erie Canal there began a new period both in the use of 
capital and the activities of the State. | 

Every year after the inauguration of the Erie Canal witnessed 
an increase in State investment in improvements. To maintain 
their ascendency or to get new business, the tidewater States 
plunged into popular but ill-considered projects. The western 
States also responded to the enthusiasms of their people, and with 
each year of the Jacksonian period migration became more lavish 
in their commitments. 


1837: THE PROSTRATE WEST 313 


The greatest of the Ohio improvements were undertaken before 
1830, and the State stocks, sold to raise the funds, found a ready 
market in eastern centers of capital. Indiana broke ground for the 
Wabash Canal at Fort Wayne in 1832, and gave charters to pri- 
vate railroad corporations to build a group of radiating roads from 
Indianapolis to the borders of the State. In January, 1836, its 
legislature responded to the idea that it was the right of every sec- 
tion of the State to have public money invested for its advantage, 
and enacted a general scheme of roads, railroads, and canals. It 
broke ground in 1836 for the Whitewater Canal. It had no advice 
as to where the money was to be found or whether the works would 
be self-supporting when done; but the enthusiasm was too strong 
a political force to be resisted. 

Illinois followed its eastern neighbors and in the same year took 
over as a public work the canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois 
River, which had been considered for a decade. It also agreed to 
nearly fifteen hundred miles of railroad, the most important lines 
of which were to be a central road, from Galena to the junction of 
the Ohio and Mississippi, a northern cross line to run somewhat 
south of Chicago, and a southern cross line at about the latitude of 
Terre Haute. It sold nearly five million dollars’ worth of bonds in 
the following year to finance the schemes, and spread the burden 
without a quiver upon a new farming population that included 
only 157,445 inhabitants in 1830, and 476,183 in 1840. The rural 
legislators saw to it that a road, a bridge, a canal, or a railroad was 
provided for every corner of the State. The State that voted such 
enterprises was perhaps not more completely hypnotized than the 
investor who advanced the funds. 

Missouri could not escape the “‘speculative intoxication” and 
in the legislative session of 1837 authorized seventeen railroads 
with an aggregated capital of seven millions.2 In Michigan the 
entry upon a program was of course delayed until the territory be- 
came a State; but in 1837 the legislature caught up with the race 
and embarked upon the construction of three parallel railroads 
across the peninsula. It authorized as well the imprevement of 
more than three hundred miles of rivers and the construction of 
over two hundred miles of canals. The governor was directed to 
borrow five million dollars on the credit of the State. The State 
had a population of 212,267 in 1840. 

The southern States were caught by the contagion, but escaped 

§ There is a good book on this, John W. Million, State Aid to Railways in Missouri (1896), 


314 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


some of the worst consequences because they happily lacked 
enough credit to become involved. The southern leaders bewailed 
the fact that the plantation country had no local capital for in- 
vestment except in farm property and slaves. They found it 
harder to borrow on the credit of the State than did the northern 
communities. On July 4, 1836, a railroad convention was held at 
Knoxville that discussed the needs of the South without uncover- 
ing practicable ways and means. The Charleston politicians had a 
keen concern in a “great southern railroad” that might build up 
a southern rival to New York. Robert Y. Hayne was chairman of 
the Knoxville convention, and spoke to delegations from every 
State south of the Potomac, as well as from Indiana and Illinois. 
But a Cincinnati and Charleston railroad could not be built on 
oratory, and ten years later the South was still holding meeting 
after meeting in the hepe of finding an “‘Open Sesame” to the 
treasures of internal improvements. 

By the winter of 1836-1837, every western State, like nearly 
every western citizen, had pledged its future upon the success of 
speculative ventures, whose mere continuance was contingent 
upon free access to capital and the perpetuation of good times. 
The capital facilities had been increased by both the hypnotic in- 
fluence of successful speculation and the financial policies of the 
Government of the United States. The number of private banks 
in the United States, operating each under its special charter from 
some State, rose in number from 506 in 1834 to 788 in 1837; and all 
of these issued their bank notes which circulated as money as far 
as the credit of the bank could float them. The merchant found it 
necessary to watch the notes with care, for there were counterfeits 
in large number, and the straggling, depreciated notes of insolvent 
banks were always a danger. But the banks increased in number 
under the natural pressure of customers for more facilities for 
credit. 

The individual banks grew in size as well. The best estimates of 
the amount of bank notes in circulation in the United States show 
that from 1820 to 1830 the per capita issues of such paper actually 
declined from $6.96 to $6.69. But with the swell of the migration 
and the accompanying need for credit to move the population and 
to finance the State improvements, the issues of circulation rose 
more than proportionately with the number of banks. In 1835 
there was in circulation $9.86 per capita; in 1837, $13.87. The 
approximate doubling of currency in seven years made money 


1837: THE PROSTRATE WEST 315 


easy, and hghtened the burden upon the debtor who could each 
year repay his debts in smaller buying values than he borrowed. 
As money became more plentiful and declined in value, prices rose. 
Valuations increased with the rise in prices; and properties that 
might have warranted loans of $1000 in 1830 appeared by 1837 to 
warrant loans of double that amount, without any necessary im- 
provement in the inherent value of the property itself. As infla- 
tion became general the banks each year did their business in the 
adjusted values. Their assets were composed of long-time mort- 
gages that were at best a dangerous foundation for issues of bank 
notes payable on demand; and that at worst might not be collect- 
ible at all because of the inflation of the values upon which they 
-were issued. When the bubble should be pricked, and prices drop 
to reasonable levels, many pieces of property would not command 
a sale price equal to the debts against them, let alone an equity to 
the owner. The conditions in 1819, in over-investment and infla- 
tion, were repeating themselves in 1836 under the normal stimuli 
of a mass migration. 

An abnormal stimulus to the tendency to inflation was provided 
by the financial policy of Andrew Jackson, expressed in his treat- 
ment of the second Bank of the United States. The trying experi- 
ences with inflation and deflation that the West passed through be- 
tween 1811 and 1825 left permanent impressions upon the men who 
bore their brunt. By 1829, when Jackson became President, the 
actual hardships had receded into memory, and prosperity was 
widespread; but the older generation of the West could not escape 
the reactions from having passed through a period in which the 
typical farmer was hopelessly in debt and was terrified by the high 
probability of losing his equity in all he owned. It was human na- 
ture to forget easily the boom years, in which the debtor got off 
cheaply from the full repayment of his debt, and to recall only the 
other slope of the curve in which the debtor was paying back more 
than he had borrowed. The hardships worked upon society by the 
cycles through which prices revolve, with periods of inflation and 
deflation alternating to destroy property values, are only to-day 
beginning to receive the consideration they deserve. The whole 
United States Sean acutely from the deflation of the early 
twenties but the West had suffered most uniformly. And although 
its pangs were lessened before 1829 there was a tendency, easy to 
revive, to believe that the steadying hand of a great bank in les- 
sening inflation was really oppressing the people of the frontier. 


316 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Jackson had no special grievance against the Bank of the United 
States in the first year of his presidency and acquired one only - 
when his trusted political lieutenants suggested that the branches 
of the bank were being used for party purposes by his political 
enemies. The charge appears to have been untrue, and to have 
been advanced because the branches stubbornly refused to be 
used for such purposes by Democratic politicians. Jackson’s sup- 
porters included the great masses of western people, inspired by 
emotional concepts of democracy, and eastern political machines 
in which idealism was carefully subordinated to the getting of 
votes. In New York and Pennsylvania, in particular, the Demo- 
cratic organization had discovered the truth that Governor Marcy 
later perpetuated in his aphorism, “‘To the victors belong the 
spoils.” The party leaders, when victorious, rewarded their fol- 
lowers with public jobs. The incidental injury to public service 
was disregarded in the more immediate party advantage. 

When Jackson became President, he held the usual Democratic 
belief that existing officeholders were dangerously aristocratic, 
and that the Government ought to be purged of them. His friends 
who wished the jobs encouraged the idea. There was a wholesale 
clearance of offices in Washington, and before the end of 1829 the 
Democratic leaders were reaching out to control the patronage 
within the Bank of the United States and its branches. Nicholas 
Biddle, president of the bank, supported the branch officials in 
their refusal to be converted into a political machine. The branch 
at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was then attacked for alleged 
favoritism to anti-Jackson men; and the President was drawn into 
the fight by his loyalty to and confidence in his friends. His latent 
doubts about a national bank were revived and were expressed in 
his annual messages of 1829, 1830, and 1831. Few but the political 
leaders of his machine were with him in his attack, for the Bank of 
the United States was useful and widely popular. It had reduced 
the chaos of uncontrolled bank notes to reasonable order, and the 
money of the United States was upon a coin basis and the banks 
were solvent. 

In 1831 and 1832 the managers of the Bank of the United States 
organized their friends in their defense and persyaded Henry Clay, 
as the leader among anti-Jackson men, to take up their cause. 
They reasoned that if Jackson injured the bank he could not be re- 
elected in 1832; and that by vigorous protest they might even stop 
his attack. In Congress, a bill for the recharter of the bank was 


1837: THE PROSTRATE WEST 317 


brought up in 1832 in order to force the fighting in time to use it as 
an issue in the presidential election. Biddle overreached himself 
in his desire for aggressive fighting, for nothing confirmed Jackson 
in his impressions more than resistance to them, and his personal 
popularity was so overwhelming that the mere fact of his antago- 
nism to the bank was enough to convert many who otherwise would 
have been entirely acquiescent in its policies. If ever a good cause 
was spoiled by lack of quiet tact, this was it. 

The bank bill of 1832 passed Congress, where the large Jack- 
sonian majorities nevertheless approved the bank; but Jackson 
vetoed the bill as unwise and unconstitutional. He went to the 
people on the issue, and was reélected in spite of it.2? He interpreted 
the result, however, as a vindication of his course, and in 1833 un- 
dertook to restrict and weaken the object of his enmity. The Bank 
of the United States was at this time the depository of public 
money, and collectors of customhouses or land offices deposited 
their daily receipts in the nearest branch. The western politicians 
upon whom Jackson was now chiefly relying, Francis P. Blair 
and Amos Kendall, had been through the Kentucky fight over the 
stay laws and the courts, and appreciated the political possibilities 
of an attack upon the institutions that controlled credit. As a first 
measure Jackson sounded his Secretary of the Treasury upon the 
transfer of the United States deposits from the Bank of the United 
States to other banks, which lay within his discretion; but McLane 
refused to humor the President and was shifted to the State De- 
partment. The new Secretary of the Treasury, Willam J. Duane, 
was a Philadelphia Democrat of such convictions and antecedents 
as a party man, that it did not occur to Jackson to ascertain his 
opinions in advance of his appointment. But Duane refused point- 
blank to shift the deposits, and when asked to resign, declined to 
do so. Duane was therefore removed from office and in his place 
came Roger B. Taney, who as Attorney-General in the cabinet 
had already volunteered to carry through the removal of the de- 
posits. 

Under Taney’s direction, by order of the President, the pub- 
lic receipts after October 1, 1833, were not deposited in the Bank 
of the United States but were placed to the credit of the United 
States in other local banks. Amos Kendall, as fiscal agent, had 
made the contracts with the private banks designated to receive 


3 Presidential campaigns are now attracting their historians; Samuel R. Gammon, The 
Presidential Campaign of 1832 (1922). 


318 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the funds. It was commonly charged that banks with Democratic 
directors were specially favored and that in places where there 
were no banks groups of local Democrats were encouraged to form 
them, tempted by the promise of the deposit of public money. 
The money on deposit in the Bank of the United States, at the 
moment of the cessation of new deposits, was drawn upon by 
United States disbursing officers until exhausted, but was not re- 
moved at once. The bank and its branches were forced to readjust 
their business in order to honor the Government drafts, and to 
prepare to wind up and pass out of existence at the expiration of 
the bank charter in 1836. This involved a curtailment of loans 
that brought into the business world the first premonition of an end 
to the period of open speculation. Wherever there was a branch 
bank, in 1833, there began a forced curtailment that brought dis- 
aster to business and employees, that threw unemployed men upon 
the market, and that increased the element in the population that 
was ripe for change of residence and the search for occupation. 
When the Bank of the United States closed its doors in 1836, said 
Niles’ Register, “We are now rid of the ‘monster,’ and our citizens 
will no longer be compelled to borrow its money at six per cent 
interest, but be left free to pay from seven to fourteen per cent. as 
circumstances and their necessities may require.” 

In the winter of 1833-1834 the customers of the steadiest and 
most reliable of the American banks were turned adrift, unable to 
secure their loans; while the less solvent institutions, freed from 
the scrutiny of the Bank of the United States became recipient of 
large public deposits which they were at liberty to lend to new 
customers. ‘The normal consequence of this was to lessen the safe- 
guards of credit, and to make it easier to procure loans on inade- 
quate collateral and at inflated valuations. The migration was 
rising towards the crest and individual borrowers were bidding for 
credit with which to carry out their ventures. Every successful 
venture stimulated a crop of imitators, and speculation fattened on 
itself. The United States, at the same moment, came into posses- 
sion of larger revenues than anticipated, and these increased the 
size of public deposits until fears for their safety were aroused in 
even the Administration that had deliberately broken down the 
safeguards. 

In 1832 the United States was forced to reconsider the policy of 
a protective tariff by the recalcitrance of South Carolina. Since 
the first tariff of 1816 the forces favoring protection as a policy had 


1837: THE PROSTRATE WEST 319 


become compact and sectional. The South was guided by men like 
Calhoun to a belief that protection was an unfair tax for the bene- 
fit of the North. The law of 1816 was extended and enlarged in 
1824 and again in 1828. In 1832 it was further revised, and Jack- 
son by signing it showed that whatever he thought of Henry Clay, 
he had no unconquerable aversion to Clay’s policy of an American 
System. Jacksonian Democracy did not fear central government 
as such, as Jefferson’s did; it only feared central government di- 
rected by its political enemies. 

Calhoun, who had been organizing southern opinion to meet 
this issue, led South Carolina into nullification in the fall of 1832. 
Jackson was disposed to fight the issue through, the more so be- 
cause he had now broken with Calhoun and classed him among his 
enemies. But the compromisers in Congress, led by Clay himself, 
were willing to meet South Carolina halfway; and in 1833 there 
passed a compromise tariff to lower the rates gradually until after 
1840. Under the new law the customs receipts, hitherto the chief 
financial reliance of the United States, had severe fluctuations 
after 1833, and in 1834 the total revenue of the Government fell 
away a third, from thirty-four millions, to twenty-two. But in 
1835 and 1836 the customs increased rapidly, and the proceeds of 
sales of the public lands jumped to new heights that not only over- 
came all deficits from the tariff but established new levels for gross 
income. In the five years before 1834 the average annual revenue 
of the United States Government was $29,000,000; in 1835 it was 
$35,430,000; in 1836 it was $50,826,000. 

The sales of public lands, which were always an accurate means 
of gauging the rapidity and spread of the development of the fron- 
tier, rose to new volume with the Jacksonian migration. The Pub- 
lic Land Office, first organized in 1812, was submerged in the 
inundation of patents; and in 1833 there were over twenty thou- 
sand such title deeds awaiting the personal signature of the Presi- 
dent of the United States when Congress for the first time allowed 
him to employ a clerk to do this work. This was before the greatest 
period of purchase began, for not until 1835 did the total land sales 
pass the high mark of five million acres set in 1819. The prospective 
settler could buy outstanding revolutionary land scrip, or bounty 
warrants of 1812, or purchase from the States some part of their 
school lands, or buy canal grants, voted for the western canals. 
The direct sales of the General Land Office were not the whole, 
but they suggest the trend of the total. In 1834, something over 


3820 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


four million acres were sold. The total for 1835 was fifteen mil- 
lion. In 1836 it was twenty million acres. | 
The money realized from land sales averaged close to the $1.25 
fixed by the law of 1820 as the minimum price. At this rate it 
placed in the depository banks in 1834, $4,857,000; in 1835, $14,- 
757,000; in 1836, $24,877,000. The daily receipts of the local 
registers of the land offices were deposited by them in the nearest 
depository banks, and became banking capital immediately, avail- 
able for loans. Against this capital, the United States was by 1835 
drawing for running expenses, but the receipts were heavily in 
excess of any need that the Government had for money. There was 
a surplus of receipts over expenditures of more than ten millions in 
1831, 1832, and 1833. It dropped to three millions in 1834. In 1835 
it rose to eighteen millions; in 1836 to twenty. For many years the 
excess receipts had found a proper use in the retirement of the pub- 
lic debt. But at the end of 1834 the last of the debt was paid off, 
and the United States was without a creditor at home or abroad. 
The accumulating surplus now became a menace, a temptation 
upon Congress to extravagance, a license for the banks to make 
reckless loans, and a risk to the Government because of growing 

fears for the solvency of the depository banks. 

There was no credit in the land sales, yet the surplus represented 
a huge credit transaction in which the United States might become 
the loser. The buyer of public land paid for his purchase with 
money, much of which was borrowed at the bank upon a valuation 
agreed on by him and it. The receipts went into the treasury, and 
then into the bank on deposit. It was at once reloaned and became 
the means of further purchases, which in cycle increased the money 
on deposit and again enlarged the fund to be lent. The United 
States had no land buyers on its books as debtors, but for every 
cent of the cash on hand a bank was debtor, and the ease with 
which the United States could get its money was limited by the 
ability of the banks to realize upon their assets. Jackson worried 
about the reality of the public funds in 1836; and Congress was 
beset with schemes for dissipating the surplus revenue. 

By auto-intoxication the boom of 1835 and 1836 approached 
the bursting point. The more speculation, the greater the fund for 
speculation. A halt was called when Congress passed, in the sum- 
mer of 1836, a bill to regulate the deposit of public money and to 
distribute 1t among the States. There were various means pro- 
posed for getting rid of embarrassing surplus. As the election of 


1837: THE PROSTRATE WEST 321 


1836 came on, criticisms of the Administration included some 
based upon the fact that the Government was collecting so much 
more than it needed to spend. The Distribution Bill provided that 
on January 1, 1837, the treasurer of the United States should bal- 
ance his books, set aside a working capital for himself of five mil- 
lions, and prepare to deposit the rest among the States in four 
quarterly installments. This money was not to be given to the 
States, for strict constructionists believed this to be unconstitu- 
tional. It was to be placed with them on deposit only, subject to 
a right of recall, which, however, was not expected to be exercised. 
The basis of deposit was the ratio of representation in Congress. 
The first quarterly payment was to be made at once. 

- As January 1, 1837, approached, the depository banks were 
driven to the kind of curtailment that had embarrassed the Bank 
of the United States in 1833. They knew of the drafts against the 
Government deposits that would remove part of their banking 
_ funds, and were forced to accumulate money to meet the drafts. 
The wave of unrestrained speculation was halted; and as the 
second and third installments came due in April and July, 1837, it 
was apparent that the machine could not be checked without a 
smash. On May 10, 1837, the banks suspended by prearrange- 
ment, and the panic of 1837 was a fact. The fourth installment of 
the distribution was never made because Van Buren called Con- 
gress to meet in special session to repeal the law. 

In addition to the Distribution Bill which retarded the whirl of 
speculation, there was a Specie Circular that made it more severe. 
The Administration fears for the safety of the surplus were in- 
creased by the wide variety and uncertain character of the paper 
money with which business was transacted. Jackson tried to get 
from Congress in 1836 a law limiting public receipts to coin. He 
failed in this, but as soon as Congress had gone upon recess, he 
issued on July 11, 1836, an executive circular “‘to repress alleged 
frauds, and to withhold any countenance or facilities in the power 
of the government from the monopoly of the public lands in the 
hands of speculators and capitalists, to the injury of actual settlers 
...and of emigrants.”’ He directed receivers of public money to 
accept no money but gold and silver, except in case of bona fide 
resident settlers buying not over 320 acres of public land. By thus 
discrediting the paper of the banks, he discouraged land sales and 
called a halt to speculation. 

With the banks in suspension, there was wild depreciation among 


3822 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the bank notes, and numerous failures of banks and customers. 
Business stopped. Land sales fell off at once. Tariff revenue de- 
clined, because the country stopped buying. There was a deficit 
in receipts of twelve millions in 1837, and eight and a half millions 
in 1838. The farmer lost both his high prices and his market; and 
was fortunate if he did not lose his farm. For the next five years 
the United States was engaged in the painful work of settling the 
accounts created by its long financial debauch; and the western 
States acquired an enduring distrust of banks of issue. The new 
constitutions between 1837 and 1850 almost without exception 
show how a feeling against all banks was become an essential part 
of the belief of Democrats of the school of Andrew Jackson. As 
late as 1843 when the West could jest about some of its experiences 
with substitutes for money, a newspaper humorist wrote of the 
admission prices of the National Theater at Cincinnati: “‘. . . box 
tickets, two pair of chickens and a dozen eggs — pit ditto, three 
pounds of butter, and a cabbage head — gallery, any quantity of 
peas and potatoes. N.B. Fresh meats, poultry, and all the vege- 
tables of the season can be obtained at the box office on the most 
reasonable terms for cash.”’ 

By the time the United States recovered from the depression 
that followed the panic of 1837, it had passed into a different era 
of American history. The foundations of public opinion of the 
twenties had disappeared. National expansion had carried the 
domain to the Pacific. Railroad communication had become the 
dominant form of internal improvement. Corporation business 
was well established. An industrial society was rising in the East 
to offer a new form of contrast to the agrarianism of the frontier. 
And the plantation system was entrenching itself in Democratic 
politics for its struggle for existence. 


CHAPTER XXXVI 
THE TRAIL TO SANTA FE 


In the five years of depression that followed the panic of 1837 the 
United States abandoned the policy of the Indian frontier, with- 
out quite knowing why or how. Until the actual crash the various 
agencies of government, supported by public opinion, continued to 
administer the established system. After the recovery from the 
depression, it was taken for granted that the system was obsolete, 
although there was no formal act that abandoned it. By 1843, 
when there were at one moment over one thousand actual home- 
seekers starting across the Indian Country for residence in Oregon, 
it was obvious that there was something wrong with the idea that 
_ the Indian frontier could be perpetual. Earliest among the spe- 
cific forces that were destined to break it down was a growing in- 
terest in traffic with New Mexico that took on the form and name 
of the Santa Fé trade.! 

The northern provinces of Spain in America were developed at 
the terminals of radiating roads that joined on the Mexican pla- 
teau in the State of Durango. They were not established as the 
result of a persistent occupation of the country, but represented 
a conscious adaptation for the purpose of national defense. 
Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, each at the end of its 
long overland trail, took on modern shape about the time of the 
American Revolution. They were the attempt of Spain to defend 
herself to the north against the border competition of France, 
England, and Russia. 

The civilization of these provinces was old but lacked the ele- 
ment of progress. The few Spaniards who lived in them had no 
ideal of making permanent homes but were disappointed if they 
failed to find wealth that could be appropriated and carried off. 
There was no general emigration from Spain to the colonies. What 
trade there was, was limited to monopolistic trading companies, 
and the dangerous conditions of the Spanish Main in the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries gave much justification to the 
Spanish policy of limiting the traders to a few ports of entry which 


1 Katherine Coman, Economic Beginnings of the Far West. How we won the Land beyond 
the Mississippi (1912). 


824 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


they might reach only under official convoy. The oceans swarmed 
with pirates, privateers, and the public war vessels of enemies of - 
Spain. Vera Cruz was maintained as the port for Mexico and the 
northern provinces, and the economic development of New Spain 
was limited to the traffic that could be carried on through that 
port. 

The Spanish exploiters took naturally to the high country of 
Mexico, avoiding the plains along the coast. They were in search 
of precious metals and thought to find these only in the mountains. 
They soon learned of the endemic diseases that made the tropic 
flats perilous places for them to dwell. From Vera Cruz they 
pushed inland directly to the City of Mexico, and then spread 
south and north along the backbone of the continent. Their great 
road from Mexico ran north through Querétaro, Zacatecas, and 
Durango. Here it developed the eastern branch to Eagle Pass, 
San Antonio, and Nacogdoches, at whose northern extremity 
Texas appeared. It developed a western branch through Sonora 
to the Santa Cruz Valley and the Gila. The main line continued 
a little west of north to the Chihuahua Desert, across this to El 
Paso del Norte and thence up the valley of the Rio Grande del 
Norte. The northern terminus of the central road became New 
Mexico, with a capital at Santa Fé, about the time the English 
were making their first foothold upon the Atlantic seaboard. 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, New Mexico was 
separated from the American border by a thousand miles of plains 
and mountains. Even if it had not been the policy of Spain to 
prevent foreign intercourse with its colonies, the distance and 
difficulty of access would have protected Santa Fé and its related 
towns from American approach. There was no American under- 
standing of the nature of the Spanish colonial civilization until in 
1807 the Spanish outposts arrested Zebulon M. Pike and his escort 
and conducted them as prisoners through the forbidden regions. 
Pike’s book gave the first picture of the slow-moving society, with 
its antiquity, its adobe houses, and its great herds, that called 
itself New Mexico. 

Pike saw a market in New Mexico, if only it could be reached. 
The colonists, Spanish and Indian, had means, but nothing to buy. 
They dwelt more than fifteen hundred miles away from Vera Cruz 
with the connecting highway often impassable except for mule 
trains. There were few commodities that could stand the freight 
charge of delivery in Santa Fé. There were few local manufac- 


325 


THE TRAIL TO SANTA FE 
tures and few artisans of any sort. The Spanish had no idea of 
working out their own economic future with local resources. The 


ordinary Yankee “notions, 


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326 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Pike described the New Mexico market in his book. Just as he 
printed it, the so-called Hidalgo revolt took place in Mexico, and - 
there was a pretense of erecting a republic independent of Spain. 
A group of American traders, led by one McKnight, equipped a 
pack train in 1811 and set out across the plains from St. Louis, 
intent upon testing the truth of the stories of a free market at 
Santa Fé. They found the market, but it was not free. The Hi- 
dalgo revolt was suppressed, the Spanish authorities at Santa Fé 
were vigilant, and the adventurers paid for their temerity by jail 
sentences. It was still too soon to build up a traffic across the 
plains. And in 1819, when Spain and the United States established 
the Louisiana boundary, it appeared as though there might never 
be an occasion for it. The trade with Santa Fé had aroused a mild 
amount of cupidity, but not more than the fur trade with the In- 
dians was sustaining all the time. 

The Spanish barriers broke down in 1821. Even before Spain 
was displaced by independent Mexico in that year, the Spanish 
had dallied with the idea of encouraging American immigration 
into Texas, although without appreciating its possible conse- 
quences. When the news of the Mexican revolution reached the 
Missouri border in 1821, William Becknell hurriedly gathered a 
stock of goods and took the packs across the plains. He left Mis- 
souri in the late autumn, so late that his friends believed he could 
not get through. But in the early spring of 1822 he returned, heavy 
with profits, keen to repeat the trip, giving the word that the trade 
was open. ‘That spring he took three wagons through to Santa Fé, 
revealing thereby the fact that the so-called American Desert 
could be easily traversed.? 

The Santa Fé traders were an annual occurrence after 1822. 
In the early spring of each year they assembled their goods on the 
border, at St. Louis, or Franklin, or Independence. As the Mis- 
sourl settlements ascended the river, the “‘jumping-off” place 
moved with them, reaching the mouth of the Kansas River at the 
western boundary of the State in 1831. At Independence, or its 
predecessors, the horse traders assembled with horses and mules 
for sale; the blacksmiths and wheelwrights opened their shops to 
repair and build the wagons. The harness-makers freshened up 


? The Missouri Historical Review has naturally specialized somewhat in Santa Fé matters; 
it printed in 1910, “The Journal of Captain William Becknell, 1821.’ Elliott Coues as- 
sembled much bibliographical and topographical learning in his notes to The Journal of 
Jacob Fowler, 1821-22 (1898). 


THE TRAIL TO SANTA FE 827 


their stock of saddlery. In April the stocks of goods arrived on 
river steamers from Pittsburgh or New Orleans, and in May the 
traders of the year got under way. They traveled as one great 
caravan, with a loose organization for protection against the In- 
dians, until they reached the vicinity of Taos or Las Vegas, the 
outskirts of the Santa Fé country. Then their codperation ceased, 
and a race began, each for himself, to grab the market. 

The protection of the Santa Fé trade, whose inconsistency with 
Monroe’s Indian policy few saw, was an object of immediate con- 
cern. Senator Thomas Hart Benton was the incarnation of border 
opinion from the moment he took his seat in 1821, and appreciated 
what Roosevelt has called ‘‘the glamour of mystery”’ that partly 
shrouded from sight ‘Mexico, with its gold and silver mines, its 
strange physical features, its population utterly foreign to us in 
race, religion, speech, and ways of life.” Under his patronage the 
border traders received protection. Congress authorized in 1825 
_ the survey and marking of a road towards Santa Fé to project as 
far as the international boundary on the Arkansas River near the 
one hundredth meridian. Enthusiasts talked of making this into 
a real road and connecting it eastward through the capitals of the 
northwestern States to a junction with the Cumberland Road at 
Wheeling. The National Road, west of Wheeling, was indeed be- 
gun in 1825, but the full western ideal was never realized. 

The Santa Fé road commissioners were in conference with the 
Indians west of Missouri in 1825, at the same time that the Kaw 
and Osage commissioners were negotiating the basic treaties of the 
new Indian policy. The line of the Santa Fé Trail ran between the 
reserves retained by those two tribes, in almost a direct line from 
the bend of the Missouri at Independence to the great northern 
bend of the Arkansas. The Indians along the route promised not 
to molest the traders, but the latter relied more upon their own 
vigilance and fighting ability than upon this pledge. They moved 
as an armed caravan, and at night drew their wagons together, 
making an enclosed corral, with the wagon bodies providing a 
stout defense. Their live stock could be protected inside this cor- 
ral if there seemed to be danger, and experience taught them that 
Indians would think twice before charging a body of well-armed 
white men under cover. More than this the traders asked for mili- 
tary protection, and their demand coincided with the need of the 
frontier policy for a new station in the vicinity of the Indian 
Country. 


828 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Jefferson Barracks at St. Louis was the nearest protective post 
when the Santa Fé trade began. In the middle twenties there were . 
various temporary cantonments on the upper Missouri, the region 
of the Council Bluffs being frequently selected. This was too far 
away from the main trails, however, and in 1827 Fort Leavenworth 
was built as a subordinate post to Jefferson Barracks. It was on 
the west bank of the Missouri a few miles above the mouth of the 
Kansas. It was easily accessible to steamboats, and from it the 
troops that were sent out to police the border could easily operate. 
In 1829 the first formal escort was provided for the Santa Fé 
traders. Major Bennett Riley, who commanded it, led four com- 
panies of the sixth infantry to the Council Grove, where the cara- 
van was organized in June. He marched with the traders to the 
Mexican border and waited there, on the Arkansas River, until 
their return in the early autumn. There was another escort ip 
1834, and another in 1843; but once the traffic was well organized, 
the traders were generally quite able to protect themselves. 

In 1831 the great historian of this business began his first trip 
across the plains. This was Josiah Gregg, who came seeking health 
and profit and brought a discerning eye and a sense for literary 
values. His Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fé 
Trader has no equal in its field except Francis Parkman’s Oregon 
Trail that was written in the following decade. Gregg made four 
journeys to New Mexico, by various routes, and assembled most of 
the data upon the traffic that subsequent historians have appro- 
priated. The route to Santa Fé, as he described it, began about 
one hundred and fifty miles from the Missouri border, at a place 
on the Neosho called Council Grove. Here the caravans usually 
completed their military organization; up to this point there was 
no danger to warrant it. ! 

From Council Grove to the great bend of the Arkansas River 
was the next link in the journey and then for about fifty miles the 
trail followed close to the Arkansas. The Red, or Pawnee Rock, 
seen a few miles after reaching the great bend, was a sure sign to 
the traveler that he was on the right road. He left the Arkansas 
near the crossing of the one hundredth meridian, where Fort 
Dodge and Dodge City have later been erected. The Cimarron 
branch of the Red River was the next objective for most traders 
after leaving the Arkansas, and here began the arid portion of the 
route. There were springs for those who knew how to find them, at 
convenient intervals all the way to Santa Fé; but the inexpert 


THE TRAIL TO SANTA FE 329 


traveler might easily miss them and either suffer keen pangs or 
actually die of thirst. The stock, on whose continued strength the 
success of the trip depended, was the chief consideration and made 
the search for water a vital part of every day’s progress. 

There was an alternate route for those who did not cross the 
Arkansas at the hundredth meridian. This followed the stream to 
the mouth of Purgatory Creek (whose original name Purgatoire 
they mouthed to Picket-Wire), and ascended that tributary to 
Trinidad. In either case the trader approached Santa Fé from the 
northeast and through Las Vegas. 

Most of the business stopped at Santa Fé. Some of the wagons, 
however, because they arrived late or because their owners were 
more venturesome than usual, did not unpack at Santa Fé but 
kept on down the Rio Grande. Occasionally one of them reached 
Chihuahua. Some are known to have penetrated to Mexico City 
itself. The estimates of Gregg for the traffic between 1822 and 
_ 1843 indicate that it was not an imposing volume of business. It 
averaged well below three hundred thousand dollars a year. The 
number of men engaged in it each year ranged from seventy to 
three hundred and fifty, and they used from twenty-six to two 
hundred and thirty wagons. If its importance were to be judged 
by its mere size, it would have to be dismissed as trifling, but it 
had for the border a significance out of all proportion to its profit. 

Year by year the Santa Fé trade helped to build up at the bend 
of the Missouri a trading center and a military establishment. 
The men who carried on the trade extended to Mexicans and their 
rights the same indifference that they already felt towards Indians. 
The business was a constant incentive to ideas of easy conquest. 
The traders learned, as well, how mythical was the concept of the 
desert. ‘The eastern half of the seven hundred miles of trail to Santa 
Fé was easily capable of agricultural development. And as the 
Indians were settled down in this region that had been assigned 
them in perpetuity, the border became gradually conscious that 
white men might occupy this country if the Indians were only else- 
where. The Indian policy of Monroe and his successors was con- 
ditioned upon the American Desert being a real desert and the 
Indian isolation being protected by an uninhabitable region. 
Whatever let the light of knowledge in upon these untruths tended 
to make the policy impossible. Only the fact that the traders to 
Santa Fé were interested in trade and not in seeking homes re- 
tarded the disastrous consequences of their experience. The trade 


330 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


was ten years old before it endangered the existence of the Indian 
Country. In 1832, the year in which Congress turned the Indian | 
management over to a new commissioner, the Santa Fé traffic was 
joined by other proceedings across the border that speedily brought 
on the crisis.® 


§ Henry Inman, The Old Santa Fé Trail. The Story of a Great Highway (1898), is picture 
eequely told and well illustrated. 


CHAPTER XXXVII 
THE SETTLEMENT OF OREGON 


In the spring of 1832 the North American border was alive from 
Assiniboia, where the Hudson’s Bay Company was aware of a need 
for institutions of government, to the plains of Texas where the 
impossibility of assimilating American blood with Mexican was 
being revealed. Around Fort Garry, where the Red River of the 
North joins the Assiniboin, the British traders had a group of res- 
idents, some of whom had come thither from Pembina a few years 
before. Their number was approaching five thousand, and since 
the foundation of the settlement in 1811, they had been ruled by 
one-man power, the resident factor of the company. They now 
received from the paternal hand of the great company a local coun- 
~ eil of government that controlled the affairs of the half-breed fami- 
lies and made the adjustments necessary along their long cart 
route to Fort Snelling and their canoe route to the ports on Hud- 
son’s Bay. 

The Canadian extension projected around the northern flank of 
the Indian frontier as those of Mexico did around its southern end. 
In neither Canada nor Mexico did the problem resemble that of 
the United States for in neither was there a continuous pressure of 
farming population upon the Indian occupants of the soil. The 
artificial line that the United States was still engaged in drawing 
between the two civilizations was not necessary farther north or 
farther south. The activity of 1832 was at each end and at the 
middle of the American frontier. 

Independence, Missouri, was the focal point of this unusual 
ferment. In addition to the Santa Fé traders, whose outfitting 
needs had brought the village into existence, there were in 1832 at 
least three other bodies of men engaged in similar work and eager 
to hurry across the frontier as soon as the grass was ready for their 
stock. There was a fifth body that was preparing a steamboat to 
ascend the Missouri River to a new high mark of navigation. 

The American Fur Company whose Yellowstone was the first 
steamboat on the Upper Missouri, relied originally upon the keel 
boat for the fur trade. For many years the traders had laboriously 
ascended the Missouri to the Mandan villages, or above, and had 


832 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


brought down at the close of the winter hunt great bales of fur. 
There was a large efement of risk in spite of the friendly current — 
that worked with the trader on the homeward trip, for when the 
boats capsized the cargo was frequently lost and even lives were 
sometimes endangered. ‘The early narratives tell of the shifts to 
which the shipwrecked trappers resorted to improvise new craft. 
The bull-boat, framed of saplings, and covered with hides of buf- 
falo, with the seams sewed by hand and waterproofed with clay 
and tallow, was a possible though not in any sense a convenient 
vehicle. It spun with the current like a top; it was as unseaworthy 
as a tub and only dire necessity could excuse its use. The value of 
the goods to be taken up to the Indians each year and the much 
greater value of the pelts brought down, led to the construction of 
the Yellowstone and the discovery that many hundreds of miles of 
river were navigable in flood time. The steamboat was taken up 
beyond Council Bluffs in the season of 1831 and to the mouth of 
the Yellowstone River in 1832 where there was a trading post 
named Fort Union. For nearly thirty years to come, the annual 
steamers of the company kept pushing the head of navigation 
further towards the continental divide, and ended only in 1859 
when they were within a few miles of the falls near the one hundred 
and eleventh meridian, where Fort Benton was maintained. The 
expedition of 1832 gave to this trade new dimensions and perma- 
nency; and every trapper who came back after a season’s hunt in 
the Montana valleys had new observations to refute the common 
idea that here was an uninhabitable desert. If these hunters had 
been more literate, they would have weakened the idea more 
promptly. They knew the whole interior of the continent decades 
before it was surveyed or portrayed on any chart, but their hard- 
won observations were rarely reduced to maps and writing, and 
lesser men who later made the maps took most of the credit. 
Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, a French-born officer of the 
regular army, was at the head of another of the trans-frontier 
parties of 1832 and started for the Columbia Valley early in May. 
He had been granted leave of absence from the army, to take a 
private party of trappers to the Rocky Mountains and com- 
manded a well-equipped force of more than one hundred men. 
Jim Bridger, who was with him, long remained a picturesque fig- 
ure among the scouts, and later erected Fort Bridger, an important 


3 James C. Bell, Opening a Highway to the Pacifie, 1858-1846 (1921), has a good biblio« 
graphy. 


THE SETTLEMENT OF OREGON 333 


trading post west of the famous South Pass of the Rockies. They 
were after furs and took wagons along to bring them back. Their 
trip was destined to outstay Bonneville’s leave, but the tales they 
brought home carried the lore of the mountains from the level of 
camp-fire legend to that of recorded fact. Washington Irving 
immortalized the trip in The Rocky Mountains: or Scenes, Inci- 
dents, and Adventures in the Far West; digested from the Journal of 
Captain L. E. Bonneville (1837). The literary exploitation of the 
Far West began at this time, carrying the frontier of letters far 
beyond the field that James Fenimore Cooper developed in the 
Leather Stocking Tales. 

Another ‘‘captain,” whose party was outfitting at the bend of 
the Missouri in 1832, was William Sublette, whose title was not 
based on any commission but was freely conferred by the tongues 
of his admiring contemporaries. He and his brother Milton were 
professional hunters whose range of travel made them familiar 
_ with the country of the trails long before the trails were worn. 

They and their associates had operated out of St. Louis for more 
than a decade. One of the parties, under General William Ashley, 
had in 1823 discovered South Pass, the rolling plain between the 
Sweetwater head of the North Platte and the westward streams 
that make up the Colorado and Columbia. A similar adventurer, 
Jedediah Smith, had traversed the whole of the Nevada desert and 
had entered Spanish California more than once.? Sublette, like 
Bonneville, was after furs: and unlike him, he knew his business. 

Nathaniel J. Wyeth took yet another party upon the plains in 
1832. His ambition was to develop a permanent seat of trade in 
the Oregon Country and to get there overland. He recruited his 
company in Boston and was the object of a somewhat embarrass- 
ing interest as he crossed the States to the Missouri border, for his 
knowledge of the plains was less than his pretense. His party, after 
a few weeks of camp and drill on an island in Boston Harbor, went 
by sea to Baltimore, there took the cars to Frederick, whence they 
walked to Brownsburg. Here they took steamboat to Pittsburgh, 
thence to St. Louis and from there bought passage to Independ- 
ence. But they grounded at Lexington and were forced ashore, 
to walk the rest of the way to the western boundary of the State. 
A quaint boat that they brought with them, a cross between a 
dory and a prairie schooner, attracted more attention than the 


2H. C. Dale, The Ashley-Smith Explorations, and the Discovery of a Central Route to the 
Pacific, 1822-1829 (1918). 


334 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


fact that this was a real commercial venture and testimony to a 
new interest in the Far West.’ | 

So numerous were the enterprises of 1832, and so much in excess 
of those that had been undertaken in the years before, that it is 
safe to ascribe the beginning of a strong trans-frontier influence to 
this year. The whole United States, internal as well as external, 
was In commotion. The bank attack was on, and South Carolina 
was defiant. Black Hawk was leading his braves up the Rock 
River Valley; the frontiersmen of Maine were on the verge of 
private war with the Canadians of New Brunswick over their 
boundary troubles; the Seminole of Florida were uneasy over the 
forced migration west. The Oregon Country made its appearance 
beyond the western horizon, to induce first a traffic and then a 
migration of home seekers. 

Under the treaty of 1827 with England, the Oregon Country 
was held in joint occupation by the two claimants, subject to the 
right of either to terminate the agreement on one year’s notice. It 
had taken a generation for the Pacific front of the continent to 
assume even this degree of definition in the affairs of England and 
the United States, for at the close of the Revolutionary War neither 
country had advanced a claim to possessions here. The ancient 
occupation of North America by Spain and Russia had extended 
spheres of influence that met somewhere in the vicinity of the 
Columbia River, but no boundary agreement had been settled 
upon before the British and American wedge of influence was 
thrust in between these countries from the eastern side of the con- 
tinent. The western ripples of the War of 1812 washed upon the 
Pacific, and Astoria was among the spoils of war. The United 
States became, piecemeal, the assignee of whatever claims Spain 
possessed, in addition to new rights based upon visitation and 
development. Through Louisiana was acquired the full right of 
approach to the eastern side of Oregon. By the treaty of 1819 
Spain formally relinquished her claims to territory north of the 
forty-second parallel. But the matter was academic to both 
British and American statesmen, and the English treaty of 1818 
ran the international boundary between Louisiana and Canada as 
far as the continental watershed, and left Oregon beyond that 
ridge in joint control. For a ten-year period the joint occupation 
was to last, according to the first agreement; then it was altered 


% Thwaites reprinted the journal of the Wyeth party with other Oregon narratives in 
Early Western Travels. 


THE SETTLEMENT OF OREGON 335 


to permanent joint occupation, subject to the right to terminate 
and force a division if either claimant should so desire. During the 
life of the ten-year bond, England came to an agreement with Rus- 
sia whereby that empire withdrew its claims to anything south of 
fifty-four degrees, forty minutes, north latitude, leaving a clearly 
defined rectangle with the name of Oregon. By 1832 Oregon was a 
definite place, between the Rockies and the Pacific, north of forty- 
two and south of fifty-four-forty; but there was still no special rea- 
son why it belonged to one of its claimants more than to the other. 
In 1832, although the amount of travel across the border was 
considerable, there was no destination peyond it that possessed 
such a lure as Texas or the lead country; and for another ten years 
more the Oregon business was little more significant than that of 
Santa Fé. But as the decade advanced there was added to the 
motive of the fur trade a second motive that brought a different 
type of adventurer upon the plains and left a different type of life 
in the Columbia Valley. The period was one of eager missionary 
activity among the churches, Catholic and Protestant, and the 
establishment of new missionary fields carried the workers into 
remote corners of the world. The Indians of the Oregon Country 
were never reached by the Spanish missions, yet were described by 
explorers from the time of Lewis and Clark as possessing fine qual- 
ities of manhood and character. The Methodists sent a group of 
missionaries to serve these tribes in 1834, and the next year a band 
of Presbyterians followed them. In 1836 Dr. Marcus Whitman, 
who had gone halfway with the party of 1835, and had returned 
to the States for reinforcements, took a wagon across the Rockies 
and with his bride set up near the junction of the Columbia and 
Snake rivers the Waiilatpu Mission.* In 1840 the Jesuits sent out 
Father de Smet and founded a mission on the Bitter Root.® 
The little groups of practical Christians at the missionary estab- 
lishments laid the foundations of agricultural occupation of Oregon. 
The fur traders before them had indeed maintained permanent 
stations, such as that of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Van- 
couver, where the Willamette enters the Columbia. But their 


‘The real services of Dr. Whitman have been discredited by the unreasonable claims 
made by some of his surviving associates and their partisans; Myron Eels, Marcus Whitman 
(1909); W. I. Marshall, Acquisition of Oregon; and the long-suppressed Evidence about Marcus 
Whitman (1911); Edward G. Bourne, “The Legend of Marcus Whitman,”’ in his Essays in 
Historical Criticism (1901). 

5 H. M. Chittenden and A. T. Richardson, Life, Letters, and Travels of Fale Pierre-Jean 
de Smet, 1801-1873 (1905). 


336 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


people were transients, and their trade depended upon preventing 
the development of farming settlements. The mission homesteads, 
however, were built up as models for the Indian converts; and 
their workers had the ideal of reclaiming the Indians not only from 
paganism but from savagery. They sought to establish industry 
and a productive life in place of the vagrancy of the nomad hunters. 
They built permanent houses and cleared the surrounding fields. 
Within a year or two they discovered the charm of soil and climate 
characteristic of the Columbia country; and their letters home 
revealed these attractions in addition to those of saving souls. In 
the latter task they were not more successful than other workers 
among the tribes, for the Indians in tribal state possessed vast 
powers of resistance to civilizing influence. But as farmers they 
were triumphant. Their descriptions were so attractive that rela- 
tives and friends sought occasion to join the annual caravans from 
Independence, and each year saw a slight increase in the number 
of Americans in the vicinity of Fort Walla Walla and Fort Van- 
couver. All of them found in Dr. John McLoughlin, the factor of 
the great company at Fort Vancouver, a friend, counselor, and 
banker. These settlers raised the question as to how long the 
country could get along without either a formal government or a 
national sovereign. Joint occupation became precarious as soon 
as either English or Americans wanted to occupy Oregon. 

By appointing Dr. Elijah White to be Indian Agent for the 
United States in Oregon in 1842, the question of control was def- 
initely raised and emigration thither was encouraged. White’s 
party included 130 persons, with 18 wagons. The same year, the 
War Department sent the son-in-law of Senator Benton, John C. 
Frémont, a young officer of the regular army, to explore the road 
to South Pass. The trail was well known and a formal exploration 
was hardly needed, but Frémont managed to identify himself so 
completely with this and the other routes to the Pacific that the 
nickname ‘“‘pathfinder” clung to him throughout his life, and he 
appeared to have discovered the various trails instead of merely 
first recording them on an accurate map. 

The Oregon Trail followed the valley of the Platte River to its 
source in the Rocky Mountains.’ The emigrant started at Inae- 

8 F. V. Holman, Dr. John McLoughlin (1907). 

7 Henry Inman and William F. Cody, The Great Salt Lake Trail (1898); Francis Park- 
man, Oregon Trail (1846); Harrison C. Dale, ‘‘The Organization of the Oregon emigrating 
Companies,”’ in Oregon Historical Society Quarterly, vol. xv1, — a magazine indispensable 


to the historian of the Northwest. All of these matters are well summarized in Joseph 
Schafer. History of the Pacific Northwest (1905). 


THE SETTLEMENT OF OREGON 337 


pendence or some point above it on the Missouri. In the forties, 
with the beginning of settlement in Iowa, there were several roads 
developed across northern Missouri and southern Iowa, that led 
to the Missouri River south of the mouth of the Platte, which is 
among the Council Bluffs. Anywhere between the mouth of the 

Platte and that of the Kansas the traveler might cross the river 
and make his entry to the plains. There was one well-traveled 
road that went with the Santa Fé Trail for some distance to a 
point on the divide between the Osage and Wakarusa rivers, and 
then branched northwestwardly to the Platte River at the head of 
Grand Island. Between this road and the line of the Platte River 
were many trails radiating from the head of Grand Island to 
points on the Missouri River. Any of these might be taken by the 
Oregonian; and all of them were bad since at the time of their use 
in May the river and creek bottoms were afloat, and the wagons 
had to fight alternate mud and ridges. The streams of the region 
ran generally across the line of march. 

_ From Grand Island until the forks of the Platte were reached 
(near Julesburg, Colorado) the road was good and the grades were 
easy. On either side of the river, or up its dry channel, the wagons 
could advance so regularly that the life of their occupants fell into 
a standard routine. From the mouth of the north fork, which the 
trail followed, the country became more hilly; and above the 
mouth of Laramie Creek it speedily became mountainous. The 
Sweetwater branch of the North Platte rises near South Pass, 
through which the Oregonians made their way. Frémont got this 
far in 1842 and explored the mountains on either side of the pass 
before returning to the United States. The travelers pushed on 
across the various tributaries of the Green River and began their 
downward course at the headwaters of the Snake. The journey 
from the Missouri to the Willamette was all of two thousand miles 
long, and about half the distance was rough going that tested 
the perseverance of the migrant and the endurance of his stock. 
Around Green River the road was extremely rough, and the water 
was almost undrinkable. Alkali was everywhere, offensive to men 
and animals. Disease and hardship left their marks upon both, 
and the trail was by 1842 marked with graves, bones of oxen, and 
the discarded household goods of those whose wagons broke down 
or whose stock gave out. In the following spring the flood of mi- 
gration struck the trail, and more than a thousand emigrants 
gathered at the Missouri crossings in May. 


338 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Between 1837 and 1842 there was less than the normal shifting 
of population in the United States. The grandiose schemes for | 
advancing prosperity had fallen flat in the former year. Some of 
the debts were actually repudiated by the States that incurred 
them; others were compromised with the creditors; the individual 
farmer had speculative obligations to meet, and yet lacked a mar- 
ket for the only goods he could produce. There was no region that 
by its prosperity attracted the floating population. The aspira- 
tions of the discouraged frontier produced a new political party 
and elected William Henry Harrison President in 1840, much as 
they had elevated Jackson to the same office twelve years before. 
The growing repute of Oregon was the first thing to break the 
spell. The westward movement revived in 1843. 

Every year after 1842 a larger party met at the Missouri and 
crossed to Oregon. Congregating at the edge of the Indian frontier 
and pushing across it, the emigrants had many contacts with the 
Indians colonized there, and the plains tribes beyond them. Fort 
Leavenworth became more important as the strategic center of 
the region, and along the trail various posts were opened where 
travelers might replenish their outfits. Except for such supplies as 
these stations carried in stock and the game that could be shot 
along the march, the emigrant train was dependent upon itself fora 
period of from four to eight months. In 1846 Congress allowed the 
War Department to garrison selected spots for military posts. 
The first of these, near the head of Grand Island in the Platte, was 
310 miles from Fort Leavenworth and was called Fort Kearny, 
after Stephen Watts Kearny, first lieutenant-colonel of the dra- 
goon regiment. Farther out the trail, 337 miles west of Fort 
Kearny, an old adobe trading post at the mouth of Laramie Creek 
was bought and became Fort Laramie. For thirty years nearly 
everything that affected the Sioux of the plains was in some way 
associated with this post. Beyond South Pass were private posts 
at Fort Bridger, Fort Hall, and Fort Boisé. In the numerous jour- 
nals that have survived the migrations, these spots stand out as 
the landmarks of the trail. After 1845, the emigrant commonly 
carried in his kit a copy of Frémont’s journal with a useful map of 
the country as far as the Pacific.’ 

When the Oregon Country was spoken of by emigrants, they 


8 J. C. Frémont, Report of the exploring Expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 
1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44 (28th Congress, 2d Session, 
Senate Document 174). 


THE SETTLEMENT OF OREGON 339 


generally meant the long fertile valley of the Willamette River, 
running north from California to a junction with the Columbia at 
Fort Vancouver. Here the Americans took root, from Portland up 
to Salem. There were smaller groups around Whitman’s mission 
on the Walla Walla; in the valley of the Grande Ronde which the 
settlers had to cross between Snake River and the Walla Walla 
there were a few. The mission workers and the employees of the 
Hudson’s Bay Company were of much aid to them as they arrived 
in Oregon ragged, footsore, and often hungry at the approach of 
winter. Even before White arrived with the emigration of 1842 
there was a need for government. He made it his business to 
guide the community in this direction in the following spring. 

The benevolent despotism of Dr. McLoughlin was overturned 
by the American Oregonians in May, 1843, when they formed at 
a convention held in a place called Champoeg, a local government 
based upon the laws of Iowa Territory. They had no laws, no land 
titles, and no rights, but they erected one of the spontaneous gov- 
ernments of the frontier that met their minimum needs until Con- 
gress was ready to make them into a territory. They sent a mes- 
senger to Washington to ask such treatment, but Congress had 
not yet given notice under the treaty of 1827 and was not ready 
for action. 

Oregon became a national political issue before any steps were 
taken to solve it as a social problem. Between 1841, when Harri- 
son’s death in office turned the Presidency over to John Tyler, and 
the inauguration of Tyler’s successor in 1845, a Democratic ad- 
ministration made ready to incorporate Texas in the Union. The 
unwillingness of the Senate to ratify a treaty of annexation forced 
the issue into politics on the eve of a new election. The Demo- 
crats embraced it, came out with James K. Polk for the “‘reannex- 
ation” of Texas; and added “‘the whole of Oregon or none” as a 
slogan to sweeten northern public opinion. The policy was not 
advanced as one of expansion but was defended upon the ground 
that both tracts belonged to the United States of right. Polk 
accepted both with sincerity and determination but found it con- 
venient to agree to a compromise upon Oregon in 1846. On June 15, 
James Buchanan, Secretary of State, negotiated a treaty with 
England whereby the forty-ninth parallel, the old line of 1818, was 
extended to the Pacific Ocean. It was a reasonable compromise of 
a matter in which neither side had a good case against the other. 
The campaign cry, sometimes phrased as “fifty-four forty or 


340 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


fight,” lacked a sound justification in fact. The treaty left the 
Columbia River in the United States. | 

With the rising interest in Oregon and the migration across the 
frontier, the Indian policy of 1825 was quietly dropped, and the 
region of the plains, from being a providential boundary to check 
American dispersion, became an annoying impediment to com- 
munication between the coasts. There was yet no white use found 
for the plains, and no tendency of the agricultural frontier to 
advance by the old process into the country directly west of Ar- 
kansas, Missouri, and Iowa. But the travel through and across the 
Indian Country dispelled the notion of its universal barrenness.. 
The War Department did not even try to enforce the provisions 
of the Indian Intercourse Act as to white entry into Indian Coun- 
try. The military posts authorized in 1846 were in contemplation 
of a permanent use of the trails, and between the forty-second 
parallel and the forty-ninth the United States was now for the first 
time in ownership of a tract facing the Pacific Ocean. Congress 
was dilatory in meeting its responsibility for the new possession 
and did not create the Territory of Oregon until 1848, 


CHAPTER XXXVIII 
THE “STATE” OF DESERET 


THE belief that the Indian frontier was to last forever was almost 
universal in 1832 and was accepted with as little question on the 
frontier as in the East. No testimony to this is stronger than that 
which was given unconsciously by the prophet of the most mili- 
tant of the border sects, Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York, 
founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. 
This leader announced in 1830 that it had been revealed to him 
that his church was to conduct missions among the Gentiles who 
were to be won back to the fold and among the Indians whose 
savagery was to be reclaimed. In this year he printed his bible, 
The Book of Mormon, completed the formal organization of the 
church and dispatched missionaries to the Indian Country. In the 
following summer, led by the reports of the first missionaries, he 
declared that revelation had indicated the spot where the church 
was to be established for all time. He named Independence, Mis- 
sourl, as “the land of promise and the place of the city of Zion,”’ 
and visited it in person to dedicate the tabernacle. Here with the 
Gentiles on one hand and the Indians on the other, he expected the 
Mormon Church to fulfill its mission. 

The Mormon Church, first under Smith and then under his 
more stable successor, Brigham Young, played an active part in 
frontier thought for thirty years. Its rise and structure indicate 
the intellectual and spiritual uneasiness of the border settlements. 
Its spectacular trek in search of Zion brings it in line with the 
other forces that carried American interests toward the Pacific in 
the decade after the Jacksonian migration. 

The ferment of the twenties included many revolts besides the 
beginnings of Mormonism.! Jacksonianism was one manifestation © 
of it, and the most pervasive. Anti-masonry was one, giving the 
first view of the aspirations of the new community around the east- 
ern end of Lake Erie. Scientific thought was in upheaval because 
of the speculations of the young scientists just back from their stud- 
ies at the new German universities. Occasional historical students, 
drilled in the new critical scholarship of Niebuhr, were challenging 

1W. A. Linn, The Story of the Mormons (1902). 


342 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


tradition with evidence. Individuals were breaking from the creeds 
of every Christian church and were demanding the right to give. 
their own interpretation of the documents containing the revela- 
tions of Jesus Christ. Even so broad a body as the Society of 
Friends, that had no creed, was split into followers of the orthodox 
faith and those of Elias Hicks. Ralph Waldo Emerson laid down 
his preaching as a minister of the Unitarian Church and took up 
the teachings of a philosopher at large. On the frontier, where 
religion had ever been more. emotional than elsewhere in the 
United States and where the waves started by the great revival of 
1801 had not entirely spent their force, strong preachers took their 
congregations with them and founded personal churches. Human- 
itarianism was afoot, and movements for temperance and abolli- 
tion of slavery were taken up with religious passion. It was a poor 
prophet who could not gain a few converts, whatever he taught; 
and an unstatesmanlike one who could not build them into a new 
church. The nation was ripe for spiritual leadership and yearned 
for voices speaking with authority. Scores of new movements 
came to light. Those that outlasted the voice and personality of 
the founder became important indexes of the religious capacity of 
the United States. Of these none was more significant than the 
church that Joseph Smith established. 

Palmyra, New York, lies in that region south of Lake Ontario to 
which the Erie Canal brought tumultuous development in the 
twenties. Before 1817 the country was almost untouched by white 
men; a decade later it gave birth to the Anti-Masons who upset the 
political balance of Jackson and developed into the new Whig 
Party. Among the pioneer families who came early to Palmyra was 
one from Vermont, bringing with it a lad named Joseph Smith. 
Smith was so inconspicuous in boyhood that the later recollections 
of his contemporaries seem artificial and forced. He was never 
identified with either steady farm work or any trade. He began 
to dream visions in the early twenties, and in 1827 had revealed to 
him the golden plates on which was inscribed the Book of Lehi. 
No one else saw the plates, for it was revealed to Smith that if any 
unhallowed eye gazed on them, the individual would be consumed 
by holy fire. He translated them from behind a curtain, his writer 
taking down the words as he dictated the history of the lost tribes 
of Israel, who were no other than the American Indians. The nar- 
rative of the Book of Lehi was lost, but a later, fuller narrative, the 
Book of Nephi, was published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. It 


THE STATE OF DESERET 343 


has been said that there was a revelation printed on the title page 
threatening with “pain of death” any person who should sell it 
for less than one dollar and a quarter. 

The informal organization of the Mormon Church took place 
before the publication of its book of scriptures; it became for- 
mal in 1830 after the receipt of a revelation on church organiza- 
tion that specified Smith as the divine intermediary. Other 
apostles who believed that they were receiving revelations were 
informed that they were mistaken. The new teacher picked up 
his first converts as dozens of others were doing in the same 
period. He differed from the rest in that he kept a firm grip upon 
the faithful, made tithes a real thing for them, and accumulated 
from their contributions a fund for advancing the interests of the 
church. It was difficult for critics and dissenters to stand up 
against his personality, reinforced by a claim of direct revelation.? 

In 1831 the church took up a temporary residence at Kirtland, 
Ohio, a little east of Cleveland, where the Ohio Canal was about to 
aid in the agricultural development of the community. Its scouts 
at the same time sought for a permanent site for Zion and selected 
Independence. There are said to have been one thousand converts 
in 1831, and a steady stream of these was started by the mission- 
aries who carried the gospel. There was little in the gospel that 
might not have.been found in the sermons of border preachers, 
some of whom were among the earliest converts. The historical 
content of the Book of Mormon bore a resemblance to that of 
parts of the Old Testament. It was believed that the chosen mis- 
sionary received at once a gift of tongues enabling him to visit his 
field and discourse in the appropriate vernacular. The proselytes, 
as they came in, were allowed to contribute to the welfare of the 
church and were put to work under the centralized direction of 
Smith and his assistants. A store, a sawmill, a hotel, a tannery, 
and a bank were run as part of the establishment; and there was 
none of the dissipation of initiative on individual jobs that was 
characteristic of the other settlements of the neighborhood. The 
reputation of the Mormon community that was spread abroad 
was that even the thoughts of the faithful were under control, and 
the votes, too; and that they were a close-knit unit out of sym- 
pathy with the individualistic opinion of the frontier. They were 
immediately unpopular, adding provocation by their complete ac- 


?T. B. H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints: A full and complete History of the 
Mormons, from the first Vision of Joseph Smith to the last Courtship of Brigham Young (1874). 


344 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ceptance of the teaching that in good time they would dominate 
the world. The panic of 1837, on top of the tense relations with 
neighbors already existing, made it necessary to abandon the 
temporary Kirtland post; and Zion itself had already been aban- 
doned for similar reasons. 

Independence was revealed as Zion and dedicated in 1831. 
Construction was begun and colonization progressed, making the 
place ready for the headquarters of the church to move thither. 
But Independence was not a good situation for the peace of mind 
of a new community. It was frequented by individuals, traders 
and farmers, who had no use for members of a group and who de- 
rided the teachings of Smith. The native Missourians resented the 
influx of converts and the prospect of permanent notoriety and 
found means of annoying the Mormons. There was retaliation on 
both sides, hard feeling and violence, and in 1833 Zion was aban- 
doned in favor of Far West, a new station north of the Missouri 
River in an unsettled part of what was then Clay County. 

Until the non-Mormon farmers encroached upon the settlement 
at Far West, about 1836, there was peace and development there. 
Then the normal extension of Missouri brought pressure upon it. 
The peculiar cohesion of the Mormons became again a cause of 
affront. By the time the Kirtland colony came west, it was neces- 
sary once more to move in order to procure freedom from pres- 
sure. In 1839 Smith discovered a deserted village in Illinois named 
Commerce, built and abandoned by one of the experimental com- 
munities. It lay in an angle of the Mississippi River, a little above 
the mouth of the Des Moines, and was bought at a bargain price, 
and renamed Nauvoo. The legislature of Illinois was willing to 
grant a special charter to the new town and a special amendment 
of the militia act, giving the town officers complete control of the 
local military force. Smith had means of getting himself and his 
associates elected to these offices. As an wmperium in wmperio 
Nauvoo became populous and independent, having perhaps ten 
thousand inhabitants in 1842. And up the river came the constant 
stream of new converts, more than replacing the exodus of dis- 
appointed members who dropped away. 

The expulsion of the Mormons from Illinois, like the three 
other expulsions that they suffered, reveals the frontier brand of 
intolerance. The church claimed that it was punished for con- 
science’ sake; the neighbors maintained that corrupt political 
influences and intolerable manners brought it about. It began to 


THE STATE OF DESERET 345 


be whispered that personal immorality was prevalent, and that 
the leaders of the church, at least, had taken numerous wives. 
The political leaders of both Whig and Democratic parties began 
to distrust Smith, who seems to have promised political support 
to both factions; only to announce that he expected himself to be 
elected President of the United States. In the tense party feeling 
of 1844, the Mormons found themselves disliked and distrusted by 
both parties, and there was schism even at Nauvoo. There were 
charges and countercharges, mob violence and arrests, and at last 
Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were taken from the jail at 
Carthage, Illinois, and shot. Their lynching was the final stroke. 
Migration again became the order of the day, and the new leader, 
Brigham Young, looked about for a refuge where they might live 
their life in peace. He saw no spot in the United States, and cast 
his eyes across the border to the northern part of Mexico, beyond 
the Rocky Mountains. 

Of the fifteen thousand Mormons at Nauvoo in 1846, approxi- 
mately twelve thousand stayed by the church in its troubles and 
crossed into Iowa Territory early in the winter. They abandoned 
their homes and their improvements. There was no market for a 
whole town site. They marched with what movables they could 
pack into their wagons, and made their way through southern 
Jowa to the Council Bluffs during the next summer. They win- 
tered in camp in the Pottawattamie country near the Council 
Bluffs, while Brigham Young conversed with guides who knew the 
plains and made his plans for 1847. 

In the spring of 1847 the valley from their camp site down to 
Independence was crowded with the wagons of the overland mi- 
gration. This was the fifth summer of heavy emigration, and the 
numbers ran into hundreds of wagons and thousands of persons 
and live stock. Oregon was the chief objective, but there was un- 
usually heavy freight to Santa Fé because of the needs of the army 
that had marched there in 1846. And there was a minority that 
intended to turn south at Great Salt Lake and go to California. 
Part of the Oregonians had been diverted to California by the 
stories of climate and soil, as early as the migration of 1845. 

The Mormons broke camp in June, 1847, to march as a body 
over the Oregon Trail, but Young, with a selected band of pro- 
spectors and seventy-three wagons, hurried ahead in April to choose 
a stopping place. He did not take any one into his confidence, but 
he had evidently determined that the Mormons could gain iso- 


846 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


lation by establishing a kind of life that the separate farmers 
could not live. He had learned of irrigation and thought to apply 
it in a part of the desert, believing that the close organization of 
the Mormon Church could carry it through, whereas the individ- 
ualistic and poor typical farmers of the frontier could not imitate 
it. He traveled rapidly up the Platte, not along the south bank, 
which was the usual course of the Oregonians, but on the north 
side which became thereafter the Mormon Trail.* From South 
Pass he pushed southwestward to the rim of the basin that sur- 
rounds the Great Salt Lake. The company arrived there July 22, 
with Young sick and a day behind the leaders; but here he imme- 
diately recognized the chosen land, and set his party to work on 
the first irrigation ditch and the potato patches. He staked his 
vision against the judgment of the plainsmen. Jim Bridger pro- 
mised him that he could not raise a crop in the Great Salt Lake 
Valley. 

The main column of the Mormons was on the trail in the sum- 
mer, in several bodies. Before leaving winter quarters, Young 
provided them with an order of march, regulating the number 
and equipment of the bodies, and organizing them for safety and 
protection. The practical wisdom of the order shows that he had 
learned much about the dangers of plains travel from the people 
he interviewed in 1846. A station was left behind in Iowa at 
Kanesville, later to become the town of Council Bluffs, that 
served as a forwarding post for the main settlement. Young 
wanted independence, but he had no idea of absolute isolation. 
He traveled back on the trail himself as soon as he had selected 
the site for the City of the Great Salt Lake, to encourage the main 
body and to manage the affairs. A regular post and express service 
between the Missouri River and the new settlement was main- 
tained. \ 

Only despotism could have accomplished the results that the 
Mormons brought about in the remaining thirty years of Brigham 
Young’s life; 4 and only a wise and benevolent autocrat could have 
maintained the grip upon the members of the church that made 
them willing to put up with the despotism. After the first season, 

=F, L. Paxson, “T. Turnbull’s Travels from the United States across the Plains to 
California,’ in State Historical Society of Wisconsin Proceedings, 1913, is the journal of an 


emigrant over the Mormon Trail in 1852, and has full notes and maps. 
4See the judicious and careful narrative of this in Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of 


Fe a ee a es i a - 


a ee ee ee 


ee ee ae 


Utah (1889). Richard Francis Burton, The City of the Saints, and across the Rocky Moun- — 


tains to California (1862), is a picture by a traveler of wide experience, and is still readable. 


THE STATE OF DESERET 347 


in which there was some scarcity, there was an abundance of food 
and rough comfort for every one. The farms and ditches were ex- 
tended up and down the valley that runs east of Great Salt Lake, 
and south to Utah Lake. Temporal, spiritual, and civil affairs 
were so closely blended that it is almost impossible to disentangle 
them. The church itself undertook the large supply services in 
transportation and merchandise and showed itself a capable judge 
of personal capacity, in taking into the hierarchy all of its members 
who showed power of leadership. Bishops were numerous, making 
it possible to reward with rank and title every one of importance. 
As the colony grew through the arrival of converts, new sub- 
colonies were marked out, but they were not planted in the go-as- 
you-please manner of most frontier developments. Instead of this, 
the officers of the church made the reconnoissance, selected the 
site, and then told off enough members of each craft or line of busi- 
ness to make the venture a success. Young did not tolerate any 
rival to himself in the management of Mormon affairs, but the 
graded hierarchy under him gave ample chance for recognition to 
the abler members of the church. And when individuals dissented 
or deserted, means were found to silence or evict them. 

The new gospel that the Mormon missionaries preached did not 
repudiate the teachings of Christianity, but was like that of Mo- 
hammed in accepting all that had gone before and adding to it a 
new revelation. It laid great stress upon the material benefits that 
the Saints were to enjoy and upon the earth that they were ulti- 
mately to inherit. It taxed its followers heavily and gained the 
persistent support that comes from sacrifice. It rewarded the un- 
usual members, and dominated the ordinary. It became an ex- 
periment in state socialism like nothing else that the United States 
had seen or was to see until the war organization of 1918. 

The mutterings against Mormons and Mormonism did not 
cease with the departure of the church from American territory 
into Mexican. The American suspicion of secret organization 
could not be silenced, and to the average frontier community there 
was something dangerous in the discipline under which the Mor- 
mons moved. The indiscreet promises of some of the missionaries 
were an additional affront, for they suggested that when the 
church was ready, it would precipitate a war of destruction against 
the Gentile world. More influential perhaps than either of these 
causes of unpopularity were the rumors of immorality that ap- 
peared in Nauvoo and have never been dissociated from the church, 


348 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


It is stated by an apologist for the Mormons that Joseph Smith 
knew the ‘ 
the same having been shown to him by revelation. But in the 
early days of the church, with converts drawn chiefly from the 
ordinary families of the frontier where the sanctity of the marriage 
vows ranked high, it was no time to practice it. He did not take 
his first plural wife until 1841, and the scant evidence that exists 
raises a doubt as to whether this act was that of an inspired 
prophet or merely of alustful man. On July 12, 1843, he announced 
in secret the text of a revelation concerning plurality of wives and 
celestial marriage, making it incumbent upon single women to be 
bound to some man during life in order to enjoy the full pleasures 
of salvation after death. The revelation included a special message 
directed to his first wife, Emma, bidding her not to interfere with 
the additional wives that the prophet brought into her household; 
and unbelievers have thought that perhaps the jealousy of Emma 
may have been the real occasion of the revelation. The church 
membership was by this date growing rapidly and among the con- 
verts there was a preponderance of women; unusual on the frontier 
where single women were extremely scarce and where the demands 
of husbands-elect shortened to a minimum the widows’ period of 
mourning. After the secret revelation, Smith and Young, and their 
intimate counselors, availed themselves of it to build up plural 
families in private. But they sternly denied both the families and 
the revelation in public. In at least one case an indiscreet mis- 
sionary who preached the doctrine was driven out of the church by 
excommunication. 

The rumor that the leaders were living immoral lives persisted 
in spite of all denials, and asserted that the bishops and other dig- 
nitaries were practically compelled to take plural wives in order 
to fasten them more firmly to the church. In August, 1852, the 
dogma was publicly announced at a special conference of the 
church, and Brigham Young took the offensive in defending its 
morality and spiritual soundness. From this date there was no 
concealment. When Young died in 1877 he left seventeen wives 
housed in a row of dwellings in his capital city. It does not appear 
that polygamy was ever universal among the Mormons, and there 
is much evidence that many women detested it, but most of the 
study and interpretation of the meaning of the church has halted 
around this fact, and has thus missed seeing the success of the 
order as a colonizing agent. 


‘rightfulness”’ of “plural marriage” as early as 1831, — 


THE STATE OF DESERET 349 


With the planting of the Mormon settlement in the midst of the 
desert in 1847, another objective was created to direct and stimu- 
late migration over the trails. Every year since 1843, this had 
flowed by thousands. In Oregon, spontaneous local government 
was started in 1843; in the Salt Lake basin it assumed the name of 
the State of Deseret and took shape in 1849. 

There is no evidence that shows whether Brigham had received 
a grant of land from Mexico authorizing his settlement of 1847. 
When he framed his plans, he sought to get outside the United 
States and away from chronic persecution on the border. But the 
conditions that had pursued the Mormons from their foundation 
continued to follow them. While they were on the march through 
Towa, Polk led the United States into the Mexican War, and sent 
an army across the plains to Santa Fé. Before they left winter 
quarters in 1847 the actual conquest of California was over; and 
before they had finished their new home the United States had 
_ taken title to the land they occupied. There was nothing to do but 
make the best of the facts and to seek from the United States the 
same sort of autonomy they had received from Illinois. In March, 
1849, a convention met in the City of the Great Salt Lake to frame 
@ government. 

The Mormon Church itself performed what functions of govern- 
ment were indispensable prior to 1849. The population included 
none but willing members of the faith who were ready to accept 
church leadership, and who had lost the American passion for 
separation of church and state. The convention of 1849 followed a 
call directed to “‘all the citizens of that portion of upper California 
lying east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” It agreed to send 
a memorial to Congress to create a territorial government and 
framed a constitution for the region under the name of Deseret. 
The boundaries of the projected State were generous enough to 
include Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and southern California as 
far as the harbor of San Diego. The form of government was 
substantially that of the States of the Mississippi Valley. The 
provisional officers were elected in March, 1849, and left the con- 
trol exactly where it had been before the framing of the constitu- 
tion, for Young was chosen as governor, and church officials were 
placed in every elective office. It was an efficient government; 
more so than the spontaneous governments of Oregon or Franklin 
had been. And non-Mormons passing through its jurisdiction 
often had reason to be glad of its existence. The legislature of 


F* 


@ 


350 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Deseret sent a delegate to Congress that summer. But anti- 
Mormon influences were already at work, and members of the - 
other branch of the Mormon Church (the non-polygamous group 
who were expelled while the church resided at Nauvoo) were 
pointing out the evil influence of Brigham Young. No action was 
taken by Congress for another year; but in Deseret the people 
lived safely and happily under a government of their own creation. 

Oregon and Deseret were two spontaneous colonies beyond the 
Rocky Mountains that owed nothing to Congress for their founda- 
tion. They were joined in the autumn of 1849 by a third, Cali- 
fornia, which framed a constitution for itself at the old Spanish 
village of Monterey, and demanded immediate admission as a 
State. 


CHAPTER XXXIX 
THE WAR WITH MEXICO 


Tue Republic of Texas remained independent for nine years after 
1836 because of the unwillingness of President Martin Van Buren 
to risk its annexation to the United States, and the inability of 
President John Tyler to bring it about. Its secession from Mexico 
at the moment when slavery became the controlling issue in 
American politics was an unfortunate accident, from the stand- 
point of speedy admission to the Union. There was no northern 
territory ready to be admitted with it, after the admission of the 
Arkansas-Michigan pair; and there was a growing disinclination 
on the part of northern leaders to admit more slaveholding States 
upon any basis. The leading nations of Europe recognized the in- 
dependence of the Texas Republic, but the mother country, Mex- 
ico, remained resentful and refused to admit that the insurrection 
of 1836 had been successful. The Mexican relations with the 
United States, strained on their own account, were made more 
difficult because of the Mexican belief that the loss of Texas was 
the result of a deliberate American conspiracy. 

The first serious attempt to accomplish the admission of Texas 
was made by President Tyler after the reorganization of his 
cabinet.! The presidential election of 1840, at which William 
Henry Harrison and John Tyler were elected by the Whig voters, 
was a successful revolt of dissatisfactions that had accumulated 
during the twelve years of Jackson and Van Buren. The Whigs 
carried all the northern States except New Hampshire, Illinois, 
and Missouri, and overturned the Jackson forces even in Kentucky 
and Tennessee. The revolt was inspired by much the same spirit 
as that with which Jackson himself had been victorious, and the 
personnel of the winning ticket indicated the price that the Whig 
leaders were willing to pay for insurance of success. Tyler, the 


1 Justin H. Smith, The War with Mexico (1919), will be a landmark in the historiography 
of this period for a long time. He, and all other writers on the Southwest, owe a debt to the 
great collector and preserver of local records, Hubert Howe Bancroft of San Francisco, who 
wrote, edited, or signed nearly forty great volumes of Pacific Coast history between 1874 
and 1890. From his collections, now owned by the University of California, there come 
frequent volumes in the Publications of the Academy of Pacific Coast History, directed by 
Herbert E. Bolton. 


352 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Vice President, was a southern Democrat in every sense except in 


his personal hostility to Andrew Jackson. He had nothing but this | 


in common with such of the Whigs as were inspired by real ideas. 
When the Hero of Tippecanoe, his chief, died after a month in the 
White House, the Whig victory was substantially nullified, for 


Tyler thought in terms of southern ascendency. Most of the 


cabinet of Harrison left Tyler at the first opportunity. Webster, 
Secretary of State, remained longest, for he was engaged upon an 
intricate negotiation with England that was completed only in the 
Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. When he resigned at last, and 
Calhoun finally became Secretary of State, the way was open to 
advance the Texas question. 

Calhoun’s desire to annex Texas was based upon his determina- 
tion to insure the safety of slave ‘abor in the South. Not only was 
an additional slave State to be desired, but there was a danger in 
allowing an independent nation to be slipped in between Mexico 
and the United States. He feared that England and France might 
carry on projects of their own in Texas, and that their influence 
might lead to an abolition of slavery there. The Texan leaders 
encouraged this fear by talk of their inability to live without con- 
nection with some larger nation, and spoke freely of the possibility 
that they might be compelled to seek either an alliance with 
Kurope or incorporation as a colony. Texas had no desire to enter 
upon such a course, but found that American interest in annexa- 
tion was stimulated by the thought of rivalry. 

In April, 1844, Calhoun concluded a treaty of annexation with 
Texas. Before the Texas minister would sign it, he had to be as- 
sured that if Mexico made the treaty a cause for further war the 
United States would do everything in its power to protect Texas 
against punishment. England was trying to compel Texas to 
abolish slavery, but Calhoun was not quite frank when he asserted 
that this attempt was the cause of American action. The treaty 
failed of ratification by the Senate in June, but the Democratic 
Party had by this time nominated James K. Polk and made Texas 
and Oregon a party issue. 

All through the autumn of 1844 the United States resounded 
with cries for the “‘reannexation of Texas,” and “‘fifty-four forty 
or fight.” The Texans, said Tyler, in his message on the treaty, 
‘are deeply indoctrinated in all the principles of civil liberty and 
will bring along with them in the act of reassociation devotion to 
our Union and a firm and inflexible resolution to assist in maintain- 


a ee a ae 


ee Oe ee ee 


a 


THE WAR WITH MEXICO 353 


ing the public liberty unimpaired. ...”” The South, in general, was 
for both slavery and expansion; the West was for expansion and 
not greatly concerned over slavery; the East had a strong minority 
opposed to both. Polk was elected in November, not because of a 
national mandate to carry out the Democratic promise, but be- 
cause Clay’s trimming between the forces for slavery and against 
it alienated northern Whig votes. Clay carried his own section of 
the West, Kentucky and Tennessee, but lost New York. The 
abolitionist candidate, James G. Birney, attracted three times 
enough votes to have elected Clay. Could Clay have held one 
third of Birney’s little vote, he would have gained New York and 
would have become President in 1845. As it was, however, Polk, 
though a minority candidate, won the election and interpreted the 
victory as approval of expansion. 

Tyler, too, interpreted the election as meaning Texas, and the 
Congress whose Senate rejected the annexation treaty in June, 
was ready for incorporation in the short session after election day. 
A joint resolution for annexation by either act of Congress or by a 
new treaty was passed in March, 1845, and before Polk took the 
oath of office a messenger dispatched by Tyler was on his way to 
Austin. The republic assented to annexation in June, and on 
July 4 a convention assembled to draft a new constitution suitable 
to an American State. 

One of the members of the Texas convention spoke of the fact 
that the people of the new State came largely from “the highly 
respectable and democratic States of Arkansas and Missouri,”’ 
illustrating again the general rule that frontier populations drifted 
but a short average distance. But Arkansas and Missouri were 
both too young for many of their citizens to have been born there. 
Of the sixty-one delegates in the convention the Arkansas Banner 
reported eighteen as having been born in Tennessee, from six to 
eight each in Virginia, Georgia, and Kentucky, and the rest scat- 
tered in smaller numbers over the whole East. “The delegates to 
the Convention, for intelligence, integrity and worth, would rank 
high in any country,’ wrote an Austin correspondent of the 
Charleston Courter. “There is not, perhaps, much of brilliancy, 
but a great deal of matter-of-fact sense and sound knowledge; and 
I predict that we shall form and send to you a sound and sensible 
Constitution. ...’ The delegates were as good Jacksonians as 
though they were already in the United States; they wore crépe a 
week in honor of the memory of Jackson, who died in June, 1845, 


854 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


and granted to one of their number, General Sam Houston, a leave 
of absence that he might make a pilgrimage of affection to Jack-. 
son’s home at the Hermitage. The constitution bore the imprint 
of the newest word in popular rights: married women were allowed 
to retain control of their own property, and the homestead of the 
farmer was exempted from judgment in the collection of his debts. 
For many years to come, married women’s property rights and 
homestead exemption were the rallying cries of border democracy. 

Before Texas was declared a member of the United States by act 
of December 29, 1845, the administration of President Polk was 
aware that annexation would probably occasion war with Mexico. 
The Mexican press and Government were enraged at the United 
States and a noisy war party was welcoming a certain cause of war. 
Martial ideals were violent among the Mexicans, whose young men 
rejoiced in flaming uniforms and military rank. Their army was 
overgeneraled and short of privates; its spirit was overbearing 
and hypnotized the Mexican leaders into the belief that a war 
would be brief and glorious and would forever end the American 
menace. Contempt for the commercial disposition of the United 
States was as pronounced as the belief in Mexican prowess. 

The detailed diary that Polk began to keep in the spring of 1845 
makes it possible for the historian to see the inside of the presi- 
dential mind.? He came to office not only convinced of the justice 
of both Oregon and Texas, but determined to find a means of add- 
ing to the United States, California, New Mexico, and parts of 
other provinces of northern Mexico. He was willing to acquire 
these peacefully, bartering for them the numerous financial claims 
that the United States and its citizens held against the govern- 
ment of Mexico. But if Mexico should determine to go to war 
about Texas, he would welcome it. He told his cabinet that “‘in 
making peace we would if practicable obtain California and such 
other portion of the Mexican territory as would be sufficient to 
indemnify our claimants on Mexico and to defray the expenses of 
the war...” Eventually when Mexico seemed to be slower in 
going to war than he expected, he drafted a message to Congress 
asking for a declaration against that republic on the ground that 
the United States had enough grievances to justify a war for their 
satisfaction. 

In the summer of 1845, while the details of annexation were 


? The Chicago Historical Society rendered a real service when it permitted the publica- 
tion of its manuscript of this diary under the careful editorship of Milo M. Quaife, in 1910. 


THE WAR WITH MEXICO 355 


being worked out with Texas, and Texas was nervous from its 
fear of Mexican attack, the United States made preparations for 
the eventuality of war. These involved orders to the part of the 
army that was stationed near Texas, to the fleet commanders in 
the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, and to the single consul, 
Thomas O. Larkin, whom the United States maintained at Mon- 
terey in Upper California.* Almonte, the Mexican minister at 
Washington, broke off relations with the State Department upon 
the passage of the Texas resolution, and his government in July 
recommended that war be declared against the United States as 
soon as annexation was consummated. General Zachary Taylor, 
who was in command in the Mississippi Valley, was ordered in 
June, 1845, to proceed towards the western boundary of Texas, to 
prevent a Mexican invasion; and was later informed that the Rio 
Grande was the western boundary. He did not take his station on 
that river until the following winter, but in April, 1846, was near 
the mouth of the Rio Grande, opposite the Mexican village of 
- Matamoras. 

The fleet commanders also were instructed what to do in the 
event of a war with Mexico. The forces in the Gulf were ordered 
to occupy Vera Cruz, which under Mexico as under Spain was the 
main port of entry, and the chief contact point with the outside 
world. The vital parts of Mexico were protected by the wide 
expanse of roadless deserts to the north and by tropic lowlands, 
impregnated with disease, between Mexico City and the sea. 
Only through Vera Cruz could the heart be reached, and military 
opinion was uncertain whether even here it could be accomplished. 
Commodore John D. Sloat, who had seven small war ships in 
Pacific waters, was ordered in June, 1845, to seize Upper Cali- 
fornia at once upon learning of a state of war. This meant, to him, 
the port of Monterey, which was the most important spot upon 
the western coast. 

Larkin, at Monterey, was informed of the status of affairs in a 
dispatch sent by Secretary of State, Buchanan, in October, 1845, 
and delivered in April, 1846. He was told that the United States 
would make no attempt to detach California from Mexico, but 
would welcome its freedom, self-obtained. It hoped, otherwise, to 
acquire California through purchase. The guarded language of his 
instruction was sufficient to indicate to Larkin that the Adminis- 


3 Larkin’s papers are available in ‘‘The United States Consulate in California,” edited by 
R. W. Kelsey in Academy of Pacific Coast History Publications, vol. 1. 


856 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


tration expected him to stir up the “spontaneous” revolt; and he 
proceeded to get in touch with the Americans near Monterey. 

In addition to the orders to Taylor, Sloat, and Larkin, which ~ 
were natural preparations for a state of war that seemed to be 
imminent, there was another American measure of 1845, whose 
meaning is still involved in mystery. Captain John C. Frémont, 
with a small detachment of troops, appeared in the vicinity of 
Monterey in the spring of 1846. The results of his exploring parties 
of 1842 and 1843 were now in print, but no documents have been 
found to justify or explain his invasion of northern Mexico with an 
armed party in 1845. On this, his third trip, he reached the Sacra- 
mento Valley in the autumn of 1845, and wintered near San Fran- 
cisco Bay, in spite of orders from the Mexican officers to take him- 
self and his men out of California. He does not appear to have 
been ordered here as a part of the impending war, for in the spring 
he moved north toward Oregon. Yet his presence at all is hard to 
reconcile with the conditions proper to a time of peace. His con- 
nection with Senator Benton, who may have known more than has 
been printed, and who may not have been averse to having a 
member of his family on the spot, seems to have a significance. 
At any event, in May, 1846, Frémont claimed to have received 
verbal orders from a marine lieutenant named Gillespie and 
marched his men back to the Sacramento where they were on 
hand when the news of war arrived. 

The war that Polk anticipated and that the Mexican Govern- 
ment threatened, lingered in its beginning; and as the spring of 
1846 advanced the President took measures to hasten it. He 
turned to the long docket of unsatisfied demands in the files of the 
State Department and convinced himself that these would justify 
a war. They consisted of grievances arising from the chronic dis- 
turbances of Mexican politics. From the moment of Mexican 
independence in 1821 there was a course of revolt, counter-revolt, 
and confiscation that had dire results upon the property of for- 
elgners resident in Mexico. What one ambitious dictator seized, 
the next one repudiated; and foreign claims kept the Mexican 
minister of foreign affairs always explaining and never satisfying, 
for the government did not become either steady or solvent. Dur- 
ing Jackson’s administration events reached such a state that the 
President asked Congress for power to institute reprisals in case 
Mexico continued to avoid acknowledgment or settlement. In 
1839 Van Buren succeeded in extracting from Mexico an agree- 


THE WAR WITH MEXICO — 857 


ment to arbitrate the claims; but his successors could not make 
Mexico pay the awards. A new treaty of 1843 provided for the 
satisfaction of these, and Mexico made three quarterly payments 
before it defaulted again; and additional new claims were accruing 
all the time. In December, 1845, the United States had more than 
six million dollars’ worth of unadjusted claims, and in May, 1846, 
the cabinet approved Polk’s determination to use armed measures 
to collect the debt. But before the war message was finished and 
sent to Congress, the news arrived in Washington on May 9, 1846, 
that a detachment of General Taylor’s army had been attacked on 
the Texas side of the Rio Grande and defeated in an engagement 
on April 24. 

The news reached Washington on a Saturday. On Monday 
Polk shifted his reason for the war, and sent in a message declaring 
that it already existed. “The grievous wrongs perpetrated by 
Mexico upon our citizens throughout a long period of years remain 
unredressed...’ he declared. ‘‘ The cup of forbearance had been 
exhausted even before the recent information from the frontier 
of the Del Norte. But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has 
passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our terri- 
tory and shed American blood upon the American soil.’? Congress 
supported the President in his declaration, although the country 
was lukewarm, and the Whig Party was openly critical. An Illi- 
nois congressman of that faith, Abraham Lincoln, later made 
caustic inquiry whether the spot on which the blood was shed was 
actually a part of American soil; and in New England James 
Russell Lowell turned his poetic gift to a satire of the war party 
in the Biglow Papers. 

Whether Mexico was the aggressor or not, it was impossible to 
have the war without going for it, and the army of the United 
States was in no condition for prompt attack or defense. It was 
necessary to raise and train the militia of the States, and to find 
commanders who could be trusted to carry out the Administration 
purpose. The ranking generals of the regular army were Zachary 
Taylor and Winfield Scott, both veterans of the War of 1812 and 
both Whigs. They presented a cruel dilemma. As Whigs they 
might be indifferent in prosecution and wreck the war; or, worse, 
they might succeed and wreck the Administration. The first 
Whig: President, Harrison, had been a military hero; if there 
should be a second Whig hero in 1848, no Democrat was likely to 
be able to withstand him. There was talk of asking Congress to 


358 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


revive the office of Lieutenant-General and of appointing Colonel 
Thomas Hart Benton to the supreme command; and Benton . 
would have been willing. His Democracy was excellent, but Con- 
gress was unsure of his military talent, and the thing fell through. 
Taylor and Scott were relied upon to win the war and Colonel 
Stephen W. Kearny was selected to codperate with them. 

The military strategy of the war comprised three border attacks 
upon Mexico and one blow at the center. Scott was chosen for the 
last and sent to New Orleans to build up an expeditionary force. 
In March, 1847, he landed his force near Vera Cruz; and six 
months later, on September 13, assaulted the fortress of Chapulte- 
pec, that guarded the City of Mexico. The next day he raised the 
American flag over the capital of the enemy. Taylor, in the same 
months, earned his nickname of “Old Rough and Ready” in the 
triangle of northeast Mexico that is indicated on the map by 
Matamoras, Monterey, and Tampico. Colonel Kearny led his 
Army of the West against New Mexico and into Upper California. 

Texas, New Mexico, and California, the three outposts of north- 
ern Spain in America, were not vital in the life of Mexico, but were 
accessible to the United States. Taylor held Texas, and by oc- 
cupying the Mexican states west of the Rio Grande established 
the American purpose at this point. The duty of Kearny, assigned 
him in the early summer of 1846, was to raise an army on the 
Missouri border and march overland to New Mexico and Cali- 
fornia. The war was started too late for his expedition to have the 
advantage of the best pasturage on the plains; but Colonel Benton, 
who knew all the conditions of plains travel, assured the War 
Department that the army could get threugh if it left the Missouri 
before the end of July. 

In addition to this detachment of regular troops, increased by 
enlistments, Missouri was called upon for militia, and one of 
Kearny’s captains was sent to Council Bluffs, where the Mormon 
leaders let him have a battalion of about five hundred of their young 
men. Kearny, with his main body, moved along the trail to Santa 
Fé in July. Until he reached Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River, 
where the route to Santa Fé turned southward, there was no danger 
and no need for military organization. Between this point and Las 
Vegas, he maintained a military watchfulness. In the mountains 
between Las Vegas and Santa Fé, he learned from Mexican cap- 
tives of armies raised against him and ambushes planted in the 
cafions; but none of these materialized and he marched into the 


THE WAR WITH MEXICO 359 


capital of New Mexico unharmed, on August 18. He declared 
New Mexico annexed to the United States, gave it a territorial 
form of government and proceeded down the Del Norte upon the 
way to California. In a few days his plans in this direction were 
changed, because he met a small party of dispatch bearers com- 
manded by Colonel Christopher Carson, who carried the glad 
news that California was already taken. It was no longer neces- 
sary for Kearny to lead an army through the arid valley of the 
Gila River and across the desert of southern California, and he 
sent it back, save for an escort with which he hurried on to fulfill 
his mission; for his orders directed him to assume the military 
governorship of California once it was conquered. In December 
he entered San Diego. The notes and sketches made by W. H. 
Emory, one of his party, became the basis for a report and guide 
book to the country between Fort Leavenworth and San Diego 
that ranks in importance with Frémont’s volume on the road to 
_Oregon.4 The army that Kearny left behind him on the Rio 
Grande, proceeded under Colonel Doniphan to invade Mexico by 
way of El Paso, and there established connection with the right 
wing of Taylor’s force. 

The establishment of peace with Mexico was begun even earlier 
than the opening engagement of the war. After the rupture of 
diplomatic relations in 1845 Polk sent to Mexico a special com- 
missioner, John Slidell, to undertake the purchase of New Mexico 
and Upper California. He hoped to pay for this by having the 
United States assume the financial claims against Mexico. Slidell 
spent the winter of 1845-1846 in Mexico in a vain attempt to 
carry out his instructions. The Mexican Government would not 
even receive him as a minister. 

A second attempt to reach an agreement was made at the time 
of Scott’s invasion, when the chief clerk of the State Department, 
N. P. Trist, was sent to Mexico in April, 1847. Like Slidell, Trist 
was to try for a peace ceding California and New Mexico; in addi- 
tion he was instructed to try to get Lower California. Trist trav- 
eled with Scott’s headquarters and was a cause of great dissatisfac- 
tion to the commander, who resented his presence there, although 
eventually the two found a basis for common action. In July and 
August there were numerous proposals and counter-proposals 
with the Mexicans, but until after the occupation of Mexico City 


4 William H. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Fort Leavenworth to San 
Diego (30th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Executive Document 7). 


360 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


in September, it was not possible to start serious negotiations, 
The treaty was at last signed at Guadalupe-Hidalgo on February | 
2, 1848. In this agreement Mexico accepted the line of the Rio 
Grande, which the Texans had extorted from General Santa Anna 
after the battle of San Jacinto; and an extension from it westward 
from E] Paso, along the Gila to the Gulf of California, and thence 
to the Pacific, south of San Diego Bay. The United States, on its 
part, assumed the claims against Mexico and paid $15,000,000 to 
Mexico in cash. The Senate ratified the treaty; with regret not 
because it added territory to the United States, but because the 
desires that had grown with war were not completely satisfied. 
There was a minority that wanted Chihuahua and Sonora and 
there were some who thought that now was the time to take all 
Mexico and annex it. The conquered republic had little to say in 
the settlement, for the victor had taken what he pleased and re- 
tained what he wanted, on his own terms. 


CHAPTER XL 
THE CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA 


THE transfer of title to Upper California and New Mexico and the 
adjustment of the Texas line came at the close of the Mexican 
War; but the real conquest of California was so nearly concluded 
before the war began that the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was 
only a recognition of the accomplished fact. Upper California was 
the newest of the provinces of Spain, created because of the 
dangers impending upon the northern frontier; and lost because 
those dangers were greater than the power of the nation that fore- 
saw them. It was the terminal of the westernmost of the three 
great highways originating in Durango and extending as arteries 
to the furthest outposts of the old empire. 

Alta California, and indeed Baja California, the long peninsula 
south of it, lay outside the scheme of Spain in America until after 
the settlement of Philadelphia, and the overthrow of James IT by 
William of Orange. The priests and soldiers who carried Spanish 
civilization into the interior reached Santa Fé nearly a century 
earlier and were familiar with the plains of Texas and the trail to 
Nacogdoches long before 1687, when the Jesuit, Father Eusebio 
Kino, built his convent near the head of the Santa Cruz River, 
south of the future site of Tucson.” From this station he operated 
for the rest of his life, baptizing thousands of Indians with his own 
hand, and traversing every part of the country between the Gila 
and the Sonora rivers. He believed that California was an island, 
and the maritime exploits of Spain were so modest that the real 
topography of the Pacific Coast remained long a mystery. It was 
indeed a closed sea, calmly appropriated by Spain, without con- 
test except by an occasional freebooting privateer like Sir Francis 
Drake, who skirted the American coasts about 1579. 

The occupation of Lower California began shortly after Kino 
settled in Sonora, and for the eighty years that elapsed before 
Spain expelled them from America (1767) the Jesuits were active 
in planting missions among the Indians. The Spanish crown, in 


1 Irving B. Richman, California under Spain and Mewico (1911); T. H. Hittell, History of 
Calkfornia (1885), shares with Bancroft the distinction of voluminous detail. 
2 Herbert E. Bolton, Father Kino’s Memoirs (1919). 


362 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


1697, authorized the creation of a Pious Fund to be raised by con- 
tributions from the charitable and to be expended in this work.. 
Loreto, on the Gulf side of the peninsula, was the first fruit of this 
enterprise, and eighteen missions in all were built under Jesuit 
control. Kino lived long enough to learn that Baja California was 
a part of the continent, and published in 1705 a map that showed 
it as a peninsula. The Jesuit establishments extended north to 
near the head of the Gulf of California, and when they were ex- 
pelled, their country was given over to the Dominican order, while 
the Franciscans received a free hand north of them, above the lati- 
tude of San Diego Bay, in Alta California. At the same moment 
the occupation of Alta California became a matter of grave con- 
cern to a far-seeing statesman of New Spain, José de Galvez. 

The European treaties of 1762 and 1763 brought problems to 
Spain as to England, when the former possessions of France were 
divided between these two. Spain was not anxious to receive Lou- 
isiana or to extend the frontier to New Orleans; and took few steps 
to amalgamate Louisiana and Texas. It was regarded as a buffer 
province, and its possession brought a clearer vision of the dangers 
that threatened the kind of empire that Spain maintained. On the 
north were the fur traders of England and Russia, whose annual 
hunts brought them each year nearer to the Spanish outposts and 
put in danger the policy of monopoly and isolation that Spain 
encouraged. The English settlers were to the east, and it took 
few months to reveal the weakness of the Proclamation of 1763 
in restricting their occupation to the Atlantic seaboard. The ces- 
sions of 1763 brought them nearer to New Orleans. Their more 
adventurous traders were already pushing up the valley of the 
Arkansas River. The time would come when English or Russians, 
or both, would press in upon New Spain. Hence Galvez memori- 
alized the crown to reorganize the provinces and to occupy Upper 
California. The creation of the Provincias Internas in 1776 met 
a part of his desire. The military expedition she proposed were 
under way in 1769. 

San Diego Bay was the first objective in the occupation of 
Upper California. A small naval expedition sent from the new 
port of San Blas, on the west coast of Mexico, visited the bay at 
about the same time that an overland expedition reached San 
Diego from Lower California. The soldiers and priests in the 
latter were led by Father Junipero Serra and Governor Gaspar de 
Portola and established a mission and a presidio at their destina- 


THE CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA 363 


tion in the summer of 1769. In the next few years their followers 
overran California, as far north as the valley of the Sacramento. 
Portola, himself, advanced far enough in the autumn of 1769 to 
discover what no Spaniard had hitherto expected; that there was a 
great land-locked harbor behind the Golden Gates, and that San 
Francisco Bay was more important as a strategic point than either 
San Diego or Monterey which was occupied in 1770. There was no 
Spanish establishment on San Francisco Bay until 1776, and no 
town bearing its name until after the American conquest.? In the 
course of time a village called Yerba Buena grew up outside the 
presidio and was occupied by the civilian hangers-on of the Span- 
ish occupation. But it remained true here, as elsewhere in Spanish 
America, that there was no steady stream of Castilian emigrants 
coming to make new homes and carry on the fight against nature. 
Only those Spaniards who failed to attain their desire of an inde- 
pendent fortune were willing to remain exiles from home. The suc- 
cessful exploiters of America went back. Those who remained 
hovered under the walls of presidio or mission, or procured grants 
of land in the valleys and developed an easy-going ranch life, in a 
hospitable country. 

The Spanish defensive thrust, inspired by Galvez as visitador 
general, and executed by him as Minister of the Indies, stopped at 
the northern border of the bay of San Francisco. Alta California 
was never extended much above the mouth of the Sacramento 
River. Every extension lengthened the line of communication to 
Mexico City and increased the cost of holding it. The Spanish 
crown had no money to sink in the venture and the Spanish people 
had no desire to occupy the land. By the close of the eighteenth 
century the frontier of Spanish occupation was rubbing against 
that of Russia; and from the East, the advance guard of English 
and American influence was pushing across the Rocky Mountains. 

For about fifty years after the occupation of Upper California, 
Spain maintained here a life of Arcadian deprivation. Land was 
cheap and plenty, and live stock found its own food and flourished 
without care. Wealth in the form of herds was easily obtained, 
and the genial climate lessened the importance of clothing and 
shelter. The land barons, with holdings running up into the thou- 
sands of square leagues, lived much like those of New Mexico in 
their adobe ranch houses. Their wives and daughters were able to 
wear jewels and silks, and to tread the clay floors of their homes in 

3Z._S. Eldredge, The Beginnings of San Francisco, 1754-1850 (1912). 


864 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


satin slippers that had made the journey from Seville by way of 
Vera Cruz. Their half-breed dependents were the offspring of. 
Indian women who had married soldiers discharged from the army 
at the presidios. The field laborers, so far as they had them, were 
the Indians themselves; for whom the acceptance of Christianity 
meant baptism and labor. There was the same sort of isolation 
from the currents of the world as prevailed at Santa Fé, but it was 
tempered somewhat by the fact that the Pacific Ocean was coming 
to be dotted with flags other than those of Spain. The whalers 
from the northern Pacific and the vessels on the China trade per- 
sisted in touching at San Diego and Monterey in spite of the 
refusal of Spain to welcome them there. They wanted water, 
potatoes, and fresh vegetables or meat. They had fish to sell and 
often Yankee notions. Few of the governors whose duty was to 
rebuff them were stern enough to resist the influence of presents or 
bribes, and the Spanish system throve on graft. There were, 
therefore, occasional contacts with foreigners and a small amount 
of trade in goods that Santa Fé could not get. There were even a 
few deserting seamen from the ships, who stayed in California and 
were tolerated by the Spanish residents. In 1846 there were not 
many more than six thousand Mexicans or Spaniards in all of 
Upper California. 

The golden age had begun to change before 1830, when in 
Texas the attempt was made to exclude further American immi- 
gration by law. The Spanish boundary treaty of 1819 defined the 
northern and eastern limits of California just in time to give point 
to the trespasses that were being made by American fur traders 
and explorers. In 1823 General William H. Ashley, of the Rocky 
Mountain Fur Company, found the South Pass, through which 
his successors trod the way to Oregon. In the same year Jedediah 
5. Smith hunted in the country around the Great Salt Lake. Be- 
fore Smith lost his way on the Santa Fé Trail in 1831 and was 
murdered by the Indians, he had crossed and recrossed the Ne- 
vada Desert, and spent winters both in Oregon and in California. 
After the fuller development of the Oregon Trail in 1832, the 
stragglers who wandered south into California became more nu- 
merous, and before the 1843 migration to Oregon the charm of Cali- 
fornia was receiving advertisement from the professional occu- 
pants of the Far West. 

Johann August Sutter, a German who having acquired Swiss 
citizenship gave it up for Mexican naturalization, became the 


THE CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA 365 


most active center of American influence in California in the year 
1839. He settled on the south bank of the American River, which 
is one of the largest eastern tributaries of the Sacramento, some- 
what above the junction of the streams. The modern city of Sacra- 
mento lies in the angle south and east of their junction. Here 
Sutter founded his New Helvetia, in Mexican territory, but as far 
removed from the activities of the Mexicans and their officials as 
could be accomplished without arousing adverse attention; and 
here he bought from the Russian-American Company their trading 
station, Fort Ross, which was the farthest south of Russian penetra- 
tion. After 1840, Sutter with his fort, his farms, his herds, and his 
henchmen, was a continuous source of apprehension to the Mexi- 
can authorities at Monterey, although they gave him official 
standing as an alcalde, or petty magistrate. He became, as well, 
the friend and outfitter of the stragglers who crossed the Sierra 
Nevada. Most of the passes from the Nevada Desert to the coast, 
whether above or below Lake Tahoe, descend on the western side 
- to some of the tributaries of the American River. The first sign of 
civilization that the trader or explorer saw was Sutter’s ranch. In 
its owner they found a man of cultivated interests, ready to help 
them and to supply their needs. In California, Sutter played much 
the same part that Dr. McLoughlin played in Oregon. 

The Oregon migration of traders and missionaries, as has been 
seen, was an annual affair after 1832, and made a small beginning 
with homeseekers led by Dr. White in 1842. Thereafter the emi- 
grants were numbered by thousands, and the trail from Independ- 
ence to The Dalles, where the Columbia River breaks through the 
Cascade Mountains, was crowded with wagons and marked with 
the wreckage and graves of the emigrant trains. As early as 184i 
occasional members of the procession avowed their destination to 
be not Oregon, but Upper California. The fact that this belonged 
to Mexico was no more of an obstacle than was Mexican ownership 
of Texas; or than the Sauk and Fox hunting rights in Illinois had 
been to the prairie farmers. 

The historian of The Trans-Mississippi West (1922), Professor 
Cardinal Goodwin, tells of the excitement caused along the Mis- 
souri border by one of the earliest of the California “boosters,” a 
French trapper, Robidoux by name. Robidoux had been West, 
and described California as “‘a perfect paradise, a perpetual 
spring.” He made it appear like the Garden of Eden, when he de- 
clared that there was freedom from chills and fever. “There never 


366 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


was but one man in California who had the ague,” he asserted. 
“He was from Missouri, and carried the disease in his system. It 
was such a curiosity to see a man shake with the chills that the 
people of Monterey went eighteen miles into the country to watch 
him.” In 1841 a caravan of forty-eight, whose secretary, John 
Bidwell, has left among the Bancroft manuscripts An Immigrant’s 
Recollections of a Trip across the Plains, went from Missouri over 
the familiar Platte trail to the vicinity of Fort Hall on the Snake 
River. Here they made their own trail across the alkaline plains to 
the Humboldt River, which they followed down its course until it 
empties into its “‘sink.” They found their way across the Sierra 
Nevada and into the southern side of San Francisco Bay where the 
party was broken up. 

Every year after 1841 there were parties on the trail for Cali- 
fornia. In the winter of 1843 Frémont visited the country. His 
first expedition to South Pass in 1842 was followed the next season 
by a trip to the mouth of the Columbia. From The Dalles of the 
Columbia he turned south. The maps of 1843 were still inaccurate 
in their details of Pacific topography, and it was in particular un- 
certain whether there was any great natural highway to the coast 
south of the Columbia. It was known that the Colorado was not a 
highway. Its deep, rough gorge constituted an almost impossible 
barrier from its head, at the junction of the Grand and the Green, 
to its mouth at the Gulf of California. Except at two or three 
places abreast of the southern part of California, it has not been 
possible to take a railroad across the cafion; and even at these 
crossings the steep sides of the ravine through which the river 
bottom runs have offered refractory problems in engineering. At 
Yuma, near the mouth of the river, was the easiest way across, 
where the Spanish priests and explorers had found their way 
through from Sonora to the: Pacific. There was a party of emi- 
grants who used this route, going from Missouri to Santa Fé, and 
through Yuma, in 1841. But the Colorado River itself constituted 
a barrier for all time. 

The maps of the early nineteenth century, based on rumor and 
the reports of missionary parties, showed a River Buenaventura, 
rising near Great Salt Lake and flowing into the Pacific through 
a pass not far from Lake Tahoe. Undoubtedly the maps were 
founded upon a visit to the upper course of the Humboldt River, 
and the assumption that it must find its way to the sea. The fact 
that the stream empties into a lake and marsh, known as the Hum- 





THE CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA 367 


boldt Sink, could be ascertained only by observation. Frémont set 
the issue at rest in the winter of 1843-1844, when he moved south 
along the Sierra Nevada, from the Columbia to southern Cali- 
fornia, and proved that the Buenaventura was a myth. His jour- 
nal and map, published the next spring, helped to disseminate 
true knowledge of the coast district. Several hundred emigrants 
crossed the trail to California in 1844 and 1845. In the latter year, 
an organized effort was made to meet the Oregon caravan at Fort 
Hall, and to divert a large fraction of it to California. In 1846, in 
spite of the state of war, the emigrants crowded the trails and 
California ranked with Oregon in the public mind. 

The Donner party of 1846 has commonly been mentioned to 
illustrate the hardships and dangers of the California trail. It 
shows, quite as pointedly, the fact that California, of itself, had 
become an objective of the westward drift. The Donners, George 
and Jacob, and their party, were among the hundreds of Missis- 
sippi1 Valley farmers who made up their minds to experiment with 
the Far West in the winter of 1845. They made their preparations 
carefully. They had considerable property and some ready money. 
There were eighty-seven in their immediate group, which acquired 
a special identity west of South Pass. Up to this point, they 
marched with the caravan. Here they refused to be guided by the 
common judgment and insisted on trying a cut-off running south 
of Great Salt Lake, instead of keeping the main road across its 
northern end. They were slowed down by inexperience and poor 
guides and reached the Sierra after winter had closed in. The 
heavy drifts of mountain snow held them prisoners and buried 
their live stock. The rescuing party in the spring found that they 
had cut firewood from the topmost branches of trees of consider- 
able size, because the snow had hidden everything else. Thirty- 
nine of the party died. The fact that their sufferings were due to 
stubbornness and ignorance did not lessen the catastrophe or 
intimidate others from venturing upon the plains.’ 

The Mexican War hastened the annexation of California but 
did not cause its conquest. This was under way before the war 
began. The peaceful penetration that carried the frontier of the 
United States into Texas and Oregon was at work and must have 
produced the same results in California. When the rumor of war 


4A child of the party wrote in her old age Eliza P. Donner Houghton, Expedition of 
the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate (1911). The women and children were all brought 
through. : 


368 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


reached the Americans on the bay of San Francisco they possessed 
the initiative to act for themselves. 

The Bear Flag Republic sprang to life before the declaration of 
war was known to the Americans in California. The preliminary 
instructions, prepared in 1845 for Sloat and Larkin, were for- 
warded in duplicate to these agents, and one set of them came 
through in the hands of A. H. Gillespie, whom the President sent 
as a dispatch bearer. Gillespie delivered the instructions to Sloat 
in writing; to Larkin he repeated them verbally, having com- 
mitted the original to memory and then destroyed it. He visited 
Monterey, and Yerba Buena and New Helvetia, and then pushed 
on northward in search of Frémont’s camp. He brought Frémont 
back to the Sacramento, although it is still a mystery what he said 
to him, or what he had a right to say. In June Frémont made a 
camp on the Feather River, which is the next great eastern tribu- 
tary of the Sacramento, north of the American Fork. The Ameri- 
cans of the region at this time convinced themselves that the Mexi- 
can authorities were raising a force to expel the foreigners. They 
organized a raiding party, seized a herd of Mexican horses, and on 
June 14 raised the flag of revolt at Sonoma. They made a flag 
carrying a red star and a bear, and called themselves an independ- 
ent republic. They invited Frémont to put himself at the head of 
their movement; and he, after a modest hesitation, accepted the 
responsibility. Their career was cut short by the arrival of Sloat, 
with news of the declaration of war, and orders to seize Monterey 
and possess himself of California. 

The resistance of the Californians to the American conquest 
was brief and slight. The Mexican troops were too few in number 
to offer serious obstruction, and the Mexican population was dis- 
persed over too wide an area to be mobilized for defense. The bond 
of union with Mexico was fragile at best and was weakened by the 
glimpses of the outside world that Californians had gained because 
of their position on the Pacific. The forces of Sloat, Frémont, and 
the revolutionists were joined in July, and Commodore Stockton 
who soon arrived to relieve Sloat continued active codperation to 
make the conquest permanent. San Diego and Los Angeles were 
occupied, as well as all the places around the bay. There was a 
revolt of the Spanish in southern California in the autumn, and 
Stockton was temporarily forced to abandon both San Diego and 
Los Angeles. But in December Kearny arrived by the Yuma 
route, and early in January, 1847, all resistance ceased. Thereafter 


THE CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA 869 


the only trouble of the American commanders in California was 
whether Stockton or Kearny was in command, with authority to 
govern the province until the President should otherwise direct. 
Each had sweeping orders, from the Secretaries of War and the 
Navy respectively; and each was disposed to insist upon his own 
supremacy. They took it out upon Frémont, who had no orders at 
all, and was their junior. By giving him inconsistent commands, 
they forced him to disobedience; and eventually they arrested him 
and sent him east for court-martial.® 

In December, 1847, Polk discussed with Congress the fact that 
New Mexico and California “are now in our undisputed posses- 
sion, and have been so for many months, all resistance on the part 
of Mexico having ceased within their limits.’ He did not propose 
to relinquish either of the provinces, since only by holding them 
would the United States be able to procure an indemnity for the 
war and its precedent grievances. “‘Mexico commenced the war,” 
he said, “‘and we were compelled in self-defence to repel the in- 
vader and to vindicate the national honor and interests...” He 
recommended that Congress extend the “civil jurisdiction and 
laws of the United States” over them at once, without waiting for 
formal treaty of relinquishment from Mexico. He urged again, as 
ke had urged in 1846 and 1845, that a territorial government be 
provided for the settlers in Oregon. The only government they 
possessed was a temporary and extra-legal agreement of their own, 
which was “‘wholly inadequate to protect them in their rights of 
person and property, or to secure to them the enjoyment of the 
privileges of other citizens.” In less than two years the thrust of 
migration to the Pacific had changed the balance of the United 
States, pushing its borders northwest to Puget Sound and south- 
west to San Diego Bay, and forcing upon the attention of Congress 
the political disposition of a domain half as large as the whole 
United States had been before 1845. Once more the frontier had 
called the tune; but this time the politicians of the East and South 
were locked in a struggle of their own which must be settled before 
they could adjust western problems on their merits. 


§ John Charles Frémont, Memoirs of my Life Including in the Narrative Five Journeys of 
Western Exploration (vol. 1, 1887). The publication and profit of Grant’s memoirs greatly 
stimulated autobiography writing. 


CHAPTER XLI 
FAR WEST AND POLITICS 


Tue hope of President Polk that Congress might in 1847-1848 
take up and adjust the government of the region beyond the 
Rockies was doomed to disappointment. At the opening of the 
session Scott was in Mexico City and the other generals were in 
undisputed possession of their conquests; but the treaty was not 
signed, and storms of politics were rising in intensity. During the 
following spring the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was completed, 
and the American factions set to on the issue of slavery in the ter- 
ritories. ‘The northern forces that had tried to limit the war with 
David Wilmot’s proviso that there should never be slavery in the 
territory to be acquired, hoped to beat the party of Polk in the 
presidential election that was impending. They chose a southern 
Whig and a military hero, Zachary Taylor, as their party chief, 
and elected him over Lewis Cass, Democrat, of Michigan. It was 
not a clear contest, and Taylor was again a minority President, as 
Polk had been; and as in 1844 the victory was due less to the power 
of the candidate than to the fact that a split in New York factions 
kept its preferred party from carrying the State. With New York 
reversed, Cass would have won, as Clay would have won in 1844. 

The measures for organizing the Far West were pushed during 
1848 without much result. The free soil demand was that the 
status of slavery must be settled first and that it must be for- 
bidden in the whole area. Polk believed that it would be a fair 
compromise to extend the line of 36° 30’ to the Pacific and pro- 
hibit slavery north of that lne. Calhoun advanced the doctrine 
later summarized in the words “the Constitution follows the 
flag,” and declared that the Constitution was already in force in 
the Far West, and by implication legalized slavery everywhere. 
Webster denied that the Constitution could affect anything but 
States in the Union and said that the Far West was already free 
because there had not been slavery in either Oregon or California. 
The southern politicians became devotees of the Missouri Com- 
promise because by declaring its effectiveness to make Oregon 
free, they could claim that it made the other territories slave. 

A bill to organize Oregon, New Mexico, and California was dee 


FAR WEST AND POLITICS 371 


bated in 1848, but when it passed in August only the first territory 
survived the debate. Polk signed the Oregon bill August 14, 1848, 
and explained at length that he did so only because Oregon was so 
far north of 36° 30’ that it was certain to be free in any event. The 
remaining problems of the conquered territory could not be solved 
this year, or even the next. 

After the creation of Oregon Territory there remained four con- 
crete questions respecting the new country. Nearest home was a 
question on the Texas boundary. The United States had espoused 
against Mexico the Texas claim to the Rio Grande as a western 
boundary, but was not disposed to admit the validity of the claim 
as against itself. The province of New Mexico, which the United 
States and not Texas had taken, always included both sides of the 
Del Norte, or upper Rio Grande. To concede the whole of the 
Texas claim would throw into Texas half of New Mexico. On the 
other hand, if the Texas claim were denied, it would discredit the 
American contention that by the annexation of Texas “American 
soil” was extended up to the Rio Grande. There was need here 
for a careful compromise, and Texas, aware of its opportunity, 
was hopeful of passing its revolutionary debt to the United States 
in return for territorial concessions on the Del Norte. 

Beyond Texas were three territorial problems. The Mormon 
State of Deseret was organized in 1849. Some form of government 
had to be allowed to these settlers, however unpopular they were. 
If population and solvency alone were to count, they were as ripe 
for admission as a State as many of their Mississippi Valley pre- 
decessors had been. There must also be a territory for New 
Mexico, and since Spain had never drawn any boundary between 
the Rio Grande and the Salt Lake basin, this line must be drawn 
with reasonable regard for the facts of settlement and convenience. 
Finally there was a population m California, with a Spanish 
civilization, and an American admixture, and a boundary fairly 
well defined by fact. 

In addition to the various bases of settling their relationships 
that prevented action during the final months of Polk’s tenure of 
presidency, there was still one more that Taylor confided to the 
retiring President as they drove to the Capitol for inauguration. 
This was to let them organize themselves and go; to relieve the 
United States from the responsibilities of States so remote from 
the seat of government, and to let the Rockies continue to be the 
western boundary of the American people. For a President who 


372 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


had based his policy upon the expansion of the national domain 
nothing could have been more heart-breaking from his successor. 

While Congress debated and parties fulminated upon the Far 
West, the course of development continued without hindrance, 
so altering the problem as to reduce to unimportant dimensions 
that part of it which Congress could by legislation affect. Migra- 
tion into Oregon and California was stimulated by the new noto- 
riety of the region. ‘The caravans of 1846 were surpassed by those 
of 1847; these in turn were small compared with those of 1848. 
And in 1849 the dimensions broke all records because a new factor 
had come in. Gold was discovered on Sutter’s ranch, and the 
whole world turned its attention toward El Dorado. 

The active life that found its center on the Sacramento, where 
Sutter’s establishment gave a focus to the various currents of 
American penetration, was stimulated by the events of the Mexi- 
can War. Sutter found a ready market for his live stock, and as a 
community of Americans grew up on San Francisco Bay, the need 
for supplies of food opened the doors of a new prosperity to him. 
The little village of Yerba Buena throve under American occupa- 
tion. Early in 1847 it had an American alcalde, for most of the 
victors accepted the Mexican law as still in force and operated 
through it. There were legal discussions whether the conquest 
had destroyed all law, and left California in a state of nature, or 
whether Mexican law remained intact, or whether by the fact of 
conquest the Constitution of the United States became immedi- 
ately operative. But Congress worried over these matters more 
than the settlers, who took over the government, renamed Yerba 
Buena, calling it San Francisco, in January, 1847; and who plotted 
a town site along the water front. The frontier passion for specu- 
lation in real estate followed the flag, whether the Constitution did 
or not. 

In the following winter Sutter undertook to manufacture 
lumber for the San Francisco market. He chose a site about forty- 
five miles above his fort, on the south branch of the American, 
where there was a good water power, and employed a handy man, 
one J. W. Marshall, to build the mill. Marshall was able to hire 
as laborers some of the discharged members of the Mormon bat- 
talion who had been brought to California with Kearny’s force. 
He found loose flakes of gold in the bottom of the mill race on 
January 24, 1848, and hurried down to the fort to break the news 
to Sutter. They tried to keep the matter secret, for Sutter knew 


FAR WEST AND POLITICS 373 


his mill would pay and had his doubts about the gold. But by the 
middle of March the California paper printed it, and the floating 
population of the coast started towards the diggings. 

The gold was not hard to find. Auriferous rocks underlie the 
continental divide from Central America to the Yukon, and since 
the beginning of the present geological era the mountain streams 
have been washing free particles away from their lodes and de- 
positing them in the sand banks at the bottom of their precipitous 
courses. In the thirty years after Marshall’s discovery, the 
mineral empire was extended in every direction, and thousands of 
camps sprang up around one discovery or another.! The first pro- 
spectors could start without either experience or equipment. The 
shovel, pick, and pan were the only indispensable tools. Water 
was necessary, and deposits where there was no natural supply of 
water waited for their development until engineering methods 
became more sophisticated. Meanwhile, along the bottoms of a 
multitude of streams, prospectors washed the sand and gravel, and 
‘watched the sediment for shining particles, and found them. 
When the first placer miner discovered gold on a new stream, he 
and his associates organized a mining district and adopted laws 
determining the number of running feet of river bottom each 
claimant was entitled to, and the distance up the hills on either 
side that the claim might go. They decided how much work the 
finder must do to establish a claim and how much to hold it. They 
recorded on their informal books the claims and their transfers 
and did the work so well that when the laws caught up with the 
prospectors, it was generally enough to give legal effect to the 
agreements already in force.2, Mining law upon the American 
frontier was a spontaneous growth, embodying some of the ex- 
perience of Welsh and Spanish miners, but mostly representing the 
practical adjustments reached on the ground by men used to self- 
government. It differed from the land law in that it was not the 
work of non-resident legislators or social theorists. 

In the summer of 1848 the tributaries of the American became 
the center of interest on the Pacific. San Francisco was almost 
entirely desolated, as its able-bodied population boarded up their 

1 William J. Trimble, The Mining Advance into the Inland Empire (1914), University of 
Wisconsin Bulletin, No. 638. 

2T, M. Marshall, Early Records of Gilpin County, Colorado, 1859-1861 (1920), vol. 1 
of University of Colorado Historical Collections, contains many documents illustrating the 


habits of a typical mining community; C. H. Shinn, “Land Laws of Mining Districts,” in 
Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. m. 


374 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


houses and shops and hurried to the diggings. The local paper, the 
Californian, that might have become an invaluable historical 
source, suspended publication May 29, 1848, for it, too, had joined 
the rush. The news spread up the coast, and from Oregon there 
came a stream of men down the Sacramento Valley. It spread 
down the coast and speculators hurried up from Mexico and the 
Latin states. They came from Hawaii and China and Japan as 
fast as the news could carry out, and chance sailing ships could 
bring them back. San Francisco sprang to life again, after a tem- 
porary unconsciousness, because of the profits of the supply trade. 
By the summer of 1848, immigrants were passing through the town 
by thousands, and enough gold dust was coming back from the 
diggings to prove that the discovery was a fact. 

Consul Larkin reported to the State Department, on June 1, 
that twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold had come into San 
Francisco in the preceding two weeks. He visited the camps on 
the American in person in June, and Governor Mason followed 
him later in the summer. Their official reports described the in- 
tensity of the rush. Every one seems to have gone to the diggings 
except Sutter, who stuck to his ranch and was harvesting a wheat 
crop, to sell it at thirty-six dollars a bushel. Troops deserted the 
army detachments in California or on the western plains. Seamen 
abandoned their ships in port and left the vessels stranded without 
men to move them. 

The news of the discovery reached the States in time to be given 
to the public when Congress met in 1848, but Polk’s Diary, which 
generally pictures the President’s thoughts, shows that he was 
slow in realizing that the course of western development had been 
changed. California was lifted by a single stroke from the status 
of a remote frontier to be settled gradually as farmers were willing 
to risk the trip, to that of a speculative adventure that would at- 
tract in a single year more than enough people to warrant an im- 
mediate State. The President was slow to see it; but shipmasters 
at every Atlantic port felt its significance, and announced sailings 
at once to San Francisco or to the Isthmus of Panama. When the 
vessels sailed they were crowded with passengers, young men pre- 
dominating, inspired with the gambler’s hope. 

In the ordinary routine of business, Congress had made provi- 
sion for regular communication with California in 1848. It had 
authorized a mail route thither, to be carried by water and the 
Isthmus. The contractor, William H. Aspinwall, had sent steamers 


FAR WEST AND POLITICS 375 


in ballast around the Horn to carry on the western leg of the route. 
They left the East before the news arrived, but learned it as they 
touched at South American ports. When they reached Panama, 
they found waiting there a clamorous crowd, brought by steamer 
from New Orleans or New York, demanding instant passage to 
San Francisco. The immigration of 1849 began with the landing 
at San Francisco of the first installment of the ocean-borne gold 
seekers, February 28, 1849. 

The water route was the rich man’s method of getting to Cali- 
fornia. The cost was heavy but the trip was quicker and less 
laborious than on the overland route. This way went the mer- 
chants and public officials: as well as the gamblers and parasites, for 
the idea of easy money brought into the migration a social element 
notably lacking in the ordinary movements to a new frontier. The 
great mass of the gold seekers, however, were forced to be content 
with the same methods that the Oregonians and the Mormons had 
been using for many years. They prepared their wagons, stock, 
and outfit in the late winter; and in the early spring took to the 
roads across Iowa or Missouri that came to a focus upon the great 
bend of the river, between Independence and the Mormon town of 
Kanesville, at Council Bluffs. 

The Platte route was by no means the only land way to Cali- 
fornia. There are numerous records of companies of emigrants 
who followed the Santa Fé Trail and Kearny’s road beyond it to 
southern California. Other southern routes converged at the 
Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. There were trails across 
Texas to El Paso; and thence to Kearny’s road. Some parties 
crossed Mexico and followed the padres’ trail through Sonora to 
the Gila River and the Colorado. But the first reported diggings 
were upon the northern side of San Francisco Bay, to which the 
Platte and the Humboldt gave the most direct access. Even the 
“southern mines”’ were well north, being upon the feeders of the 
San Joaquin River, with Stockton as their supply center. The San 
Joaquin and the Sacramento empty into the same arm of San 
Francisco Bay. 

The emigration of the “forty-niners”’ was the largest and most 
heterogeneous that the plains had seen. It was not made up of 
persons selected as closely as most other migrations were. There 
were more bachelors, for the gold fields were not regarded as a 
place for women. There were more who were so poor that they 
could not provide even the simple outfit of the farmer emigrant. 


876 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


There were many who were not farmers at all, for the lure of gold 
caught the townsmen. There were many who had failed at every- 
thing, as well as young men with their future still before them. 
There were numerous companies that maintained close order upon 
the march and drew their wagons at night into the corral for safety. 
But there were others who traveled alone, and some in light 
wagons who hurried along much faster than the procession. Many 
were so inexperienced that they began to discard equipment that 
they could not carry before they reached Fort Kearny on the Platte. 

The Mormons on Great Salt Lake received the forty-niners as a 
direct interposition of providence for their benefit. The first year 
in the desert, 1847-1848, tested the Mormon organization and 
courage, for in the flight from Nauvoo they had left behind or lost 
much of their movable property. Not until they harvested their 
crop of 1848 were they free from danger of starvation. When they 
brought in the early crops of 1849, they knew that the procession 
of gold seekers would want supplies and that they could provide 
them. Many a Mormon farmer did a profitable business in live 
stock, picking up the emaciated animals of emigrants for a song, 
fattening them for a few months, and selling them again at a fancy 
price. Few of the forty-niners had much money, but they had 
goods — furniture, tools, farm implements that they could not 
earry further with their animals dropping exhausted, but which 
the Mormons needed. The exchange was unavoidable for the 
miners, and profitable for the Mormons, who by the end of 1849 
were well-organized, well-fed, and well-supplied. 

The tide of gold seekers continued to flow for many years. In 
1850 there were 92,597 persons whom the enumerators could find in 
California; in 1860, 379,994. The local historians have tried to 
estimate the annual accessions, the most reliable guess being that 
of Hubert Howe Bancroft, himself an immigrant of 1852. Ban- 
croft set up in business in San Francisco and began at once to col- 
lect printed and manuscript materials for the history of the Pacific 
Slope. To-day, in the library of the Academy of Pacific Coast 
History, his collection holds for its region the place held by the 
Draper Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in 
the history of the Old Northwest. It was Bancroft’s estimate that 
some forty-two thousand persons completed the trip by the Platte 
route to California in 1849. But the volume of emigration cannot 
be measured by the survivors, for after the first few weeks the 
Californians were met every day by the returning procession of 


FAR WEST AND POLITICS 377 


those whose courage or supplies had given out and who were re- 
turning home. And near every camping ground the fresh graves 
and wooden crosses gave a clue to the multitude that died. A 
cholera epidemic accompanied the march as far as Fort Laramie, 
with a mortality of perhaps five thousand; and in the dry valley of 
the Humboldt there were starvation and thirst for many more. 

In the first months after the overturn of Mexican power in 
California the executive duties of government fell upon the shoul- 
ders of the army. Stockton exercised the powers, and then 
Kearny, and later a series of deputies whose right to rule was 
founded upon the power of the President as commander-in-chief of 
the armies of the United States. The ratification of the treaty of 
cession made no change in this, for until Congress saw fit to act, 
there were no American laws that could extend to California of 
their own force. Americans elected themselves to local offices, and 
the native Californians, who had had little use for Mexico, ac- 
cepted the new rule and codperated with it. The recommendations 
of Polk to Congress in 1847 brought no result. He repeated them 
in 1848 with still no result. He left office with forebodings as to 
Taylor’s western policy disturbing his mind. 

When Congress adjourned without action, in March, 1849, and 
the size of the migration indicated that the whole scale of Cali- 
fornia affairs was to be magnified, there was concern about the 
civil status of the colony in San Francisco and in Washington. 
Taylor was less dangerous than his threat, and responsibility and 
knowledge made him give up the idea that the Pacific communi- 
ties must be allowed to go. Instead of this he sent a confidential 
agent to California a few weeks after his inauguration, with word 
that the mining camps had better draw up a constitution for them- 
selves and make immediate application for admission to the 
Union. General Bennett Riley, who now commanded the troops 
in California, was instructed to codperate with such a movement, 
and the immigrants themselves were more than ready. Beyond 
the limited amount that could be done by voluntary association 
in the mining districts, by self-help, and by an occasional vigilance 
committee formed by outraged citizens, the community had no 
accepted basis of law and order.? Men went armed, and the nature 
of both their business and their play made altercation and combats 


® Porter Garnett, Papers of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1851, in Academy of 
Pacific Coast History Publications, vol. 1; Mary Floyd Williams, History of the San Fran- 
cisco Vigilance Committee of 1851, in University of California Publications in History, 
vol. xi. 


378 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


frequent. There was gold dust, quickly got and as quickly spent. 
There were grog shops, gamblers, and dance halls without number, 
to prey upon the miners. The men themselves were mostly young 
and care-free. There were few family ties to make for decency and 
self-restraint. Yet the community did not disintegrate into an- 
archy. From the first arrivals, the average immigrant believed in 
law; and there was a steady development of orderly habits that 
culminated in a constitutional convention, held at Monterey in 
September, 1849.4 

A native Tennesseean, William M. Gwin, who had come to Cali- 
fornia from Louisiana, carrying with him a copy of the new consti- 
tution of lowa, was the most influential member of the Monterey 
convention. His associates were chosen by free male citizens of 
the United States or the conquered area, aged twenty-one, and 
actually resident in California. They came from thirty States and 
from a wider range of economic and social conditions than was 
usual in a new frontier. Their work, says Professor Thorpe, illus- 
trates “‘the potency of those political ideas which, in the opinion of 
so varied a body of delegates, were best fitted to survive.” There 
was a slight majority of members from free States, and a much 
stronger opinion that slavery was not fitted to California condi- 
tions. The miners objected to having claims worked by slaves, as a 
few of them tried to do; and obstructed the attempt of some slave 
owners to take out claims in the names of their slaves as well as 
their own. Gwin printed the constitution of Iowa in an edition 
with wide margins, on which changes were noted by the delegates. 
The new State forbade the institution of slavery in its basie law, 
after a thorough debate of all the aspects of the subject that took 
up nearly half the whole time the convention was in session. It 
limited the suffrage to free white citizens. The constitution was 
submitted to the people in November and was ratified by the huge 
majority of 12,061 to 811 votes. A State government was elected 
in December, and a congressional delegation led by Gwin and 
Frémont, senators-elect. When Taylor met his first Congress in 
December, 1849, a new State had been formed and was asking ad- 
mission on terms not fixed by the slavery politicians, but by its 
own free citizens. 


*R. D. Hunt, “Genesis of California’s First Constitution,” in Johns Hopkins University 
Studies, vol. x11, is one of the institutional monographs inspired by Herbert B. Adams; 
more elaborate is Cardinal Goodwin, Establishment of State Government in California (1914). 
The first governor of California, who was also an Oregon emigrant, has left Peter H. Bur- 
nett, Recollections and Opinions of an old Pioneer (1880). 


FAR WEST AND POLITICS 379 


The adjustment of the territorial problem of the Far West, now 
three years overdue, was no longer subject to theoretical legisla- 
tion. The only region likely to have a large population had settled 
its own status. There were still details to be worked out respecting 
the Texas-New Mexico boundary, and the government of New 
Mexico and Utah; but the southern leaders, dismayed and exas- 
perated by the California development, sought compensation in 
other directions and uttered again the threat to break the Union. 
A convention, attended mostly by southern Democrats, met at 
Nashville in June, 1850, to consider plans of action in the light of 
the existing federal situation, as the New England Federalists had 
done at Hartford, in December, 1814. It failed to reeommend the 
extreme step of disunion, for in the meantime the national leaders 
had brought forward a scheme of compromise that was based upon 
a frank and admitted fear of secession. The Compromise of 1850 
was carried into effect in a series of laws that were signed by the 
President in September, 1850. It was not Zachary Taylor who 
- signed them, however, for he had died in July, 1850, and had left 
the office for Vice President Millard Fillmore, a New York Whig. 

Henry Clay introduced his resolutions for “the peace, concord, 
and harmony of the Union,” in January, 1850; and they were the 
subject of continuous and solemn debate for eight months. They 
could never have been passed as a body, for each of the measures 
aroused bitter antagonism in some quarter of Congress. Only by 
breaking them up into several laws, each of which might pass by 
its own separate majority, could they be enacted. The moder- 
ates prevailed, led by Clay, and by Webster until he left the Senate 
to become Fillmore’s Secretary of State. California was admitted. 
Texas was given ten million dollars in return for a suitable bound- 
ary indicated by the Missouri Compromise line (36° 30’), the 
meridian of 103°, and the parallel of 32° thence to the Rio Grande.® 
New Mexico and Utah were organized as territories and separated 


§ Marcus Baker, The Northwest Boundary of Texas (U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin, 
1902); W. J. Spillman, ‘‘Adjustment of the Texas Boundary in 1850,’ in Texas State 
Historical Association Quarterly, vol. viz; I. J. Cox, “The Southwest Boundary of Texas,”’ 
in Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, vol. v1. The meridian of 103° (Greenwich) 
is slightly east of that of 26° (Washington), although the Spanish treaty of 1819 uses the two 
systems as the same. Congress has used both, New Mexico being bounded west by a Wash- 
ington meridian and east by a Greenwich meridian. Many good map makers are led into 
slight errors because of this lack of identity in the two systems; and the confusions are made 
worse because in some instances an erroneous survey, made in good faith, has finally been 
accepted as though it were really the legally designated line. The western boundary of the 
Texas panhandle, which the law fixes at 103°, is a good test of map-making accuracy. 


380 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


by the parallel of 37°, except for an extension of New Mexico 
northward to 38° at the northeast corner. The South received its 
compensation in that no word was said about extending the Mis- 
souri Compromise line across the territories to California, the omis- 
sion leaving slavery to be settled by local option in Utah and New 
Mexico. It received also a rigorous amendment of the fugitive 
slave law of 1793. It was forced to tolerate a concession to north- 
ern radicals in the prohibition of the slave trade in the District of 
Columbia. 

The ambition of the leaders of the State of Deseret to become a 
State in the Union was postponed gratification, because of objec- 
tions to Mormon polity. The constitution that the handful of 
Americans in New Mexico offered for approval was ignored. The 
three territories and one State now organized for the people be- 
yond the Rockies were a sufficient recognition of their importance, 
and even this strained the bonds of the Union almost to the snap- 
ping point. The anti-slavery leaders did not claim a right to inter- 
fere with slavery in the States and were thus forced to use the 
creation of territories as the occasion for presenting their reform. 
Their aggression drove the planter leaders of the South to panic 
and extremity. 


CHAPTER XLII 
PREEMPTION 


THE resonant phrases with which Daniel Webster answered 
Hayne of South Carolina, in the debate of 1830, were destined to 
become before his death an integral part of the consciousness of the 
North and West. They translated into language that the man in 
the street could read and understand, the legal concepts that John 
Marshall had embodied in his great decisions. The Union was 
above the States, he said. Within its proper sphere, the Union 
was supreme. “Liberty and Union” were in his mind; but they 
were “one and inseparable”’; and the southern view of a Constitu- 
tion violable and voidable at pleasure was incompatible with the 
pregnant phrase with which the Constitution describes itself as the 
*“supreme law of the land.” In the battle of the sections that was 
to ensue, Marshall provided the constitutional ideas and Webster 
popularized them, until every schoolboy of the North could recite 
the peroration of the Reply to Hayne. But it has sometimes been 
forgotten that the occasion of this memorable debate was the con- 
flict of ideas in the sections, respecting the treatment of the public 
lands; and that Webster, quite as much as Hayne, or Calhoun his 
master, was animated by the hope of retaining for his region the 
alliance of the West. 

Always there has been a sectionalism in the United States — 
the ancient rivalry of the tide-water against the frontier West, or 
the newer struggle, shaped by slave labor and the plantation, 
pitting East against South, with the West as the coveted ally. 
The American System of Henry Clay was a product of the latter 
and sought to bind East to West in an alliance of mutual interest. 
The protective tariff was for the East, and the internal improve- 
ment system was for the West. If it had been possible to devise a 
treatment of the public lands mutually advantageous, the alliance 
might have become permanent, and Clay might have reached the 
height of his ambitions. But the essential interests of the western 
States ran counter to those of the industrial communities that 
flourished under the system of the tariff. The West wanted free 
access to the lands, active migration, and speedy development. 
The eastern leader saw with regret the draining off of population, 


882. HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


for in excess population he found his factory workers at a declining 
labor cost. He opposed free land as naturally as the West desired 
Hic } 

The philosophy of the Ordinance of 1787 was generous in its 
vision of the procession of new States to be formed out of the public 
domain, but was ever modified by the tide-water ascendency over 
the disposal of the lands. The general laws of 1800 and 1820 
differed chiefly in their details of method for accomplishing the 
same end, the production of a net revenue from the domain. The 
former tried high price and long credit, and was a demoralizing 
failure. The latter established the long-lasting rate of $1.25 per 
acre and produced the tidal wave of revenue that preceded and 
induced the panic of 1837. But down to the moment when that 
wave began to swell in 1832, the gross revenue from the lands was 
only thirty-eight million dollars, whereas the United States had 
paid out on their account the larger sum of forty-nine million 
dollars. 

The public domain was not a financial success, whatever it was 
as a social agency. Yet the terms of its administration were so 
important to the people of the frontier States as to dominate their 
thoughts. Under the law of 1820, the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys 
passed from the first phase of frontier existence into the second, 
the tier of commonwealths beyond the Mississippi took shape, and 
Oregon and California received their earliest increments of popula- 
tion. Every year it became more clear that no one theory on the 
domain could satisfy all, and that clash of interest here might well 
break down the alliance that Henry Clay had labored to build up. 

The East and North would have been best satisfied with the 
working of the system if it had been possible to charge and collect 
a high price for the western farms, to slow down the movement of 
population thither, and to turn a net revenue into the Treasury of 
the United States. With revenue in hand and labor supply built 
up at home, the interests of industry would have been protected. 

The States of the South shared in large measure the frontier 
belief that a price for land was a burdensome tax upon the settler, 
but had even stronger reasons for combating the program offered 
by the East. A large revenue, administered by the Government at 
Washington, tended to exalt the Union as against the States; and 
they were becoming so sensitive upon the matter of slavery control 


t William E. Dodd, Expansion and Conflict (1915), is a brilliant discussion of this scheme 
by a southerner who knows the West. 


PREEMPTION 383 


that they felt bound to impede every extension of national power. 
Therefore, the South was willing to support a lowered price, or 
none at all. The supposition that a high land price would build up 
an industrial population in the North was an additional reason for 
southern opposition. In the southern mind the tariff was evidence 
of sectional favoritism, unfair, if not unconstitutional. Every 
northern movement to check the extension of the frontier added to 
this conviction and helped prove to the South the selfishness of 
northern policy. In the arguments, overtures, and contests among 
the sections it was not possible to reduce the public lands to one 
acceptable formula. Cession, donation, graduation, distribution, 
and preémption became technical words, everywhere understood, 
and capable of rousing lofty emotions, or frenzy of denunciation 
according to the orator and the audience.? 

An outright cession of the unsold lands to the States in which 
they lay, would have pleased most of the newer States. They re- 
sented the continuation of Federal control within their limits, and 
begrudged the acreage of public land which the Government did 
not sell and they could not tax. If the land was as yet unsurveyed, 
and not upon the market, they criticized the slow movements of 
the General Land Office. If it was on sale, without a buyer, there 
was a painful prospect of its remaining thus indefinitely. The 
price appeared to be too high. The settler was impoverished by 
the debt due for his land, in the midst of millions of acres that the 
Government could neither sell nor use. Before Benton of Missouri 
had sat out his first six years in the Senate, he was demanding a 
cession of unsold lands to the States, as well as a donation to actual 
settlers of land that did not immediately find a buyer at the reg- 
ular price. 

Donation to the settler was as popular in the West as cession to 
the States, and in one form or another would doubtless have fol- 
lowed such cession. As Benton and his followers pressed the idea 
through the decades, they discovered additional reasons why the 
farm-maker was a public benefactor and entitled to remuneration. 
Some of the newer constitutions made by the frontier States in the 
forties embodied the principle that the homestead of the settler 
ought to be free from legal attachment for the payment of debts, 
and that every debtor, however insolvent, ought to be allowed to 


2 The most useful studies of this are Raynor G. Wellington, The Political and Sectional 
Influence of the Public Lands, 1812-1842 (1914); and George M. Stephenson, The Political 
History of the Public Lands from 1840 to 1862. From Preémption to Homestead (1917). 


384 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


retain a minimum property. It was only a slight elaboration of 
this idea when the leaders came to demand that the homestead 
itself should be given freely by the Government to every man who 
would reclaim it from the unoccupied domain. This became the 
homestead policy that reached success in 1862 after an increasing 
agitation for a generation. 

Graduation was urged by the Western States as a partial conces- 
sion to their interests, and one more likely to be attained. In every 
region, when a new tract of sections went on sale, the buyers at the 
public auction took the choicest pieces of land, often at fancy 
prices. Later, in accordance with the law, the remainder went on 
private sale at the standard price, and many settlers took their 
farms at this rate. But there came a time in the affairs of every 
land office when sales declined although there was much land un- 
sold. The bad lands had no buyers, and the section-seekers bal!- 
anced carefully the desirability of the less attractive acres. But 
there was no reduction in price for the sections that remained un- 
sold; and in theory they would remain forever Government land 
until some buyer should come along willing to pay the price. It 
was reasonable to urge that after lands had long remained without 
a buyer they should be reduced in price. Unless there were some 
scheme of graduation there was no way of getting rid of the Gov- 
ernment as a land-holder; and there was no equity in forcing the 
buyer to pay as much for the remnants as had been charged for the 
original fresh lands. Benton was the great advocate of graduation, 
and every few sessions brought up a bill for it in Congress, to show 
by the roll-call who were the genuine friends of western develop- 
ment. Yet he systematically failed to get it passed. 

Cession, donation, and graduation were generally unpalatable to 
the East and acceptable to West and South; but distribution was 
the reverse. The national solution of any problem had a natural 
appeal to Henry Clay, and he could not appreciate the fairness of 
giving away national property to a few States or a few thousand 
citizens. Moreover, the East so deeply opposed the western solu- 
tions that the adoption of one of them would threaten Clay’s bal- 
ance of power. He evolved, accordingly, the plan of distribution. 
This meant, not the distribution of the public lands to the States 
in which they lay, but the distribution of the proceeds of land sales 
among all the States, according to the ratio of representation in 
Congress. In 1833, the year after that in which he had been the 
National Republican candidate for the Presidency, he worked 


PREEMPTION 385 


through Congress a bill embodying his ideas of compromise, only 
to run afoul of the equally insistent ideas of Andrew Jackson. 

Clay’s Distribution Bill of 1833 gained votes from sections that 
had little in common, because of its inconsistencies and com- 
promises. Easterners voted for it because seven eighths of the net 
receipts were to be distributed among all the States. Some west- 
erners approved because one eighth of the net receipts was to be 
given directly to the State in which the land lay, thus complying in 
part with the demand for cession. The southerners who voted for 
it were attracted by a different law passed at the same time, the 
Compromise Tariff of 1833, in which Clay granted them a gradual 
but effective abolition of the system of protection. But Jackson 
withheld his approval from the bill, and in December, 1833, ex- 
plained to Congress that the measure was a violation of the funda- 
mental agreement that the lands were to be used equally for the 
common purpose. He saw a breach of faith in the favoritism that 
gave one eighth to the frontier States. He had already urged Con- 
gress to fix a price “barely sufficient to reimburse to the United 
States the expense of the... system,” and he wanted to withdraw 
the system from the States. “It cannot be doubted,” he said, 
“that the speedy settlement of these lands constitutes the true 
interest of the Republic. The wealth and strength of a country are 
its population, and the best part of that population are the culti- 
vators of the soil. Independent farmers are everywhere the basis 
of society and true friends of liberty.” 

After the veto of Distribution in 1833 the discussion of the pub- 
lic lands became almost inextricably involved with matters of 
national finance and sectional politics; and the theme thereafter 
falls within that discouraging limbo of things that never happened. 
Prosperity came and went; and was followed by panic and repudia- 
tion. The surplus revenue arose to embarrass the Treasury, and 
part of it was “deposited” with the States under the act of 1836. 
It was not “distributed”’ because of the growing constitutional 
qualms of southern politicians; and what objections these had to 
distribution of surplus applied equally to distribution of the public 
lands. Clay kept steadily at his project, however, in spite of the 
lukewarm attitude of the West towards it; but his opponents 
gained momentum in their demand for cession or donation. In 
1836 a distribution bill seemed so probable that Jackson was 
driven to draft a veto message, but the bill failed of passage. In 
1840, following the Whig victory and the success of William Henry 


886 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Harrison, Clay took steps to utilize the victory for the passage of 
distribution, and in 1841 gained the dubious triumph of an inef- 
fective law. | 

This Whig victory of 1840 was an incongruous event.? The 
same border passions that advanced Jackson to the Presidency in 
1828, ejected his successor from that office twelve years later. The 
Whigs as a party were so nearly inarticulate that they did not dare 
to reduce their beliefs to writing, lest it should cost votes. Instead 
they nominated Harrison, as a border hero, and Tyler as an anti- 
Jackson martyr, and asked every dissentient section to vote the 
ticket for whatever reason seemed best to it. Harrison was a “‘log- 
cabin”? candidate, and drew enough scattered support to gain his 
office. His western compatriots, as soon as election was over, and 
even before inauguration, demanded fulfillment of the kindly 
pledges that both candidates had made them. 

Clay, though a westerner, was a Kentuckian; and in Kentucky 
there were no public lands. His support of distribution would 
hardly have been possible had he come from one of the States of 
the Old Northwest. Benton, much better than he, represented the 
true western attitude upon this subject. And Benton, in the short 
session of Congress between the election of Harrison and the 
inauguration, put through the Senate a “log-cabin”’ law, to adjust 
the land system according to the frontier demand. Neither cession 
nor donation was practically possible, though either would have 
received western approval. He accordingly based his bill upon the 
principle of preémption. 

There was nothing new in the idea of preémption itself. In 
nearly every Congress since 1800 the matter had been discussed, 
and repeatedly Congress had permitted preémption of lands as a 
means of offsetting some of the inconveniences of the system of 
sales. It happened constantly, as the area of agricultural occupa- 
tion advanced westward, that settlers found themselves living on 
farms that they had improved, but to which they had neither title 
nor prospect of getting one. They often entered this precarious 
status with eyes open, trusting to luck or politics to relieve them; 
at times they found themselves in it because of the defects of the 
land laws. In either case the frontier farmers did not surrender 
without a fight the lands upon which they were trespassers be- 
fore the law. 


3 Arthur C. Cole, The Whig Party in the South (1913), contains colored maps showing 
the distribution of the southern vote, 1836-1852, 


PREEMPTION 387 


There was no legal way for a farmer to get upon a farm in the 
public domain until after the Indian title had been quieted by the 
United States and the land surveyed, and the area opened to sale 
following the regular period of advertisement and proclamation. 
But Indian titles were often not quieted before settlers were crowd- 
ing around the edges of the reservations and casting their covetous 
eyes upon the tracts from which they were legally barred. And 
Congress made appropriations for the survey of ranges of town- 
ships less freely than would sometimes have been convenient; 
while in spending the appropriations along the border it was 
equally impossible for Congress or the Commissioner of the Gen- 
eral Land Office to anticipate the amount of sections that ought to 
be surveyed in each region of development in order to have an 
adequate area of land available for sale. When new tracts were 
thrown upon the market, there was always the problem of keep- 
ing settlers off the unoffered land until the appointed day. And 
when available lands were exhausted before the buyers were satis- 
fied, there was no satisfactory way of keeping the surplus of 
settlers off the land, sale or no sale. | 

The first right of preémption was voted by Congress in 1801, to 
relieve certain settlers who had bought their farms from John 
Cleves Symmes, only to find that their locations were outside the 
tract to which that speculator received title from the United 
States. In consideration of their bad luck and the fact that they 
had gone ahead to improve their tracts, they were allowed to buy 
the farms in question as soon as these were offered for sale, in ad- 
vance of the auction, at the minimum price of $1.25. Buying 
ahead of the auction, at the minimum price, was the essence of 
this and every other preémption act that Congress passed. This is 
what the very word “‘preémption”’ meant. 

As the years went on, other groups of settlers asked for the pas- 
sage of special laws granting them the privilege. Sixteen similar 
special acts were passed before 1841, sometimes occasioned by 
genuine distress, sometimes to relieve persons who had deliber- 
ately trespassed relying upon the chance of a plea to Congress. In 
these years the western opinion was forming that no one but the 
occupier had a moral right to the public lands; that the speculator 
in particular was an enemy of the public; that any price was an 
affront. “‘When settlers are compelled to travel more than one 
hundred miles to enter lands, they will appeal to Congress for 
preémption rights, rather than incur the fatigue and expense of a 


388 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


journey to that extent through a trackless wilderness,” wrote one 
observer of the process. The willingness of Congress to pass such 
exemptions, of course, added to the difficulty of administering the 
land sales, for as a harassed district attorney wrote, the Govern- 
ment tolerated in these cases, “‘a trespass in the citizen which 
subsequently perfects a tztle in himself,’ and a premium was 
placed upon violations of the law. ‘The commissioner protested in 
1836, “‘the preémption privilege that may be considered as little 
else than a mere benevolence, enabling the adventurer to appro- 
priate to himself the choicest lands, most valuable mill-sites, and 
the localities for towns, at a vast cost to the public.” 

The preémption laws were nevertheless passed. Until 1830 they 
were special in character; then they were made general, conferring 
the privilege upon whatsoever citizens might anywhere have so 
trespassed within a stated period of months. In the thirties, while 
the land system was the football of politics, its administration was 
breaking down because of the soft-heartedness of Congress. 

It was breaking down as well because of the tough-mindedness 
of the settlers. The law-abiding frontiersman who went to the land 
office prepared to bid for his farm as the law directed, was chal- 
lenged by a vision of two situations that seemed equally unfair. 
In one, there was a possibility that a moneyed speculator, with no 
intention to develop the land himself, would bid on it, and thus 
either get it or raise the price for the farmer-buyer. If the pro- 
spective farmer-buyer was already residing on the tract as a squat- 
ter, the whole value of whatever improvements or clearings he 
might have made, was at stake, for he had no rights before the 
law. Confronted by the danger of high price or loss of improve- 
ments, or both, he was ready for any means of saving his posi- 
tion. 

The other situation was that of the preémptioner — the spe- 
cially favored trespasser, whom Congress had relieved from the 
necessity of bidding against speculators at the auction, and who 
was sure to get his acres at minimum price. Why, asked the 
farmer-buyer, should one farmer buy at auction, when another, no 
better, is allowed the minimum? The man who obeyed the law 
was at a disadvantage in comparison with either the speculator or 
the preémptioner. The spirit of the frontier corrected this disad- 
vantage as well as it could, even though this entailed a systematic 
violation of the land laws. 

In Iowa Territory this systematic violation was best organized 


PREEMPTION 389 


and most successful, although the “claims club,” which was the 
tool employed, appeared on many other new and developing 
frontiers. The technique was simple and required as raw materials 
only a group of squatters who had settled on part of the domain 
before the land was legally open to them. In the eastern countries 
of Iowa just behind the Black Hawk cession, there were plenty of 
these, for the volume of migration in 1833 and 1834 had been 
underestimated by the Land Office.‘ 

The first formal step of such a group to save the equities in the 
farms that they were illegally improving, and to avoid an auction 
price, was to form a claims club or association. This club would 
elect officers and provide its secretary with a book for the records. 
Each one of the members would then describe to the club the 
farm he had appropriated, in the language of the Government 
survey if possible, otherwise by metes and bounds; and if no other 
member objected, the secretary would then record the claim. If 
two or more members disputed a single tract, the club adjudicated 
the contest. 

For the remainder of the life of the claims club tts secretary 
acted as an informal recorder of deeds. He made notes of changes 
and transfers, and sometimes had the backing of the club in 
passing-on a squatter’s claim to heirs. He continued this service 
until the day approached when the receiver of the local land office, 
having completed the surveys of townships and sections, pro- 
claimed that upon a given day the land would be offered for sale 
at auction to the highest bidder, and warned citizens of the legal 
penalties attached to any collusive action that might lessen the 
free bidding or reduce the proceeds to the United States. 

It was towards this day that the whole life of the claims club 
was directed. The members of the club, already in occupation of 
part of the area that was to be auctioned off, attended the sale ina 
body, with such weapons as their spirit might dictate. The secre- 
tary attended, teo, armed with his book of records and transfers. 
As the clerk of the sale called off the description of the sections, 
one by one, the secretary of the club looked into his book to see 
who was living on it, and bid for the land at the minimum price of 
$1.25 per acre. Then he, and the occupier, and the other members 


# Benjamin F. Shambaugh, “‘Frontier Land Clubs or Claims Associations,’’ in American 
Historical Association, Report, 1900. There are many references to this type of law-defeat- 
ing organization in the Annals of Iowa, the Iowa Historical Record, and Professor Sham- 
baugh’s own Iowa Journal of History and Politics. An Alabama conspiracy of the same 
type is described in American State Papers, Public Lands, vol. v1, 187. 


390 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


of the club surveyed the gathering to see whether any other bidder 
thought it wise to make a bid. 

It generally happened that prudence kept other bidders quiet, 
and the “‘free auction”’ resulted in a sale of the farm at the price 
that would have been paid if a preémption law had already been 
passed covering these settlers and this region. There were cases, 
however, when strangers in ignorance, or speculators with courage, 
sought to buy; only to run the risk of bodily violence or social 
ostracism. The spirit of the community resented any interference 
with the squatter’s right as the frontier saw it. Grand juries could 
rarely be induced to indict for these flagrant violations of the law; 
and after indictment, petty juries of the vicinity could not be 
expected to convict. 

Between 1820 and the panic of 1837 the frontier crystallized its 
opinion that any price for the land was an imposition and that the 
auction was an affront. Special preémption acts became more 
sweeping, and claims clubs were resorted to in many more cases 
than there are surviving records to substantiate. It was not 
practical politics, as yet, to persuade the tide-water element in 
Congress to accept the homestead principle in its entirety, so the 
demand took the form of universal preémption rights. These, if 
granted, would allow the settler to squat more nearly where he 
pleased, and to perfect a title when the lands should come on sale 
by merely proving his occupation and improvement of the land 
and paying a minimum fee. 

The “log-cabin”’ bill of Senator Benton that passed the Senate 
in February, 1841, was such a bill providing for general, prospec- 
tive preémption. But the Whigs were able to prevent its passage 
in the House. The session ended, Harrison was inaugurated and 
died, and John Tyler who had disapproved of both preémption and 
graduation, became President. But Tyler was impressed with the 
financial needs of the States, which since the panic of 1837 had 
been unable to meet their budgets, and he advised Congress that 
he would favor a distribution scheme, for the proceeds of the land 
sales, providing this did not compel Congress to raise moneys in 
excess of the amount contemplated by the Compromise Tariff of 
1833. Under this act the rates were to be reduced to a flat twenty 
per cent ad valorem after June, 1842. 

A new distribution bill thus took shape in the session of 1841, 
with Henry Clay leading to its support the representatives of the 
eastern States. In neither Senate nor House had he a working 


PREEMPTION 391 


majority favoring his proposal, and hence he had to pay a price in 
each. The western Representatives demanded and secured a pre- 
emption amendment, couched in much the same terms as Benton’s 
bill that failed earlier in the year. The southern Senators procured 
a guarantee that distribution would cease if a war should ensue, or 
if Congress should raise the rate on imports above the level of 
twenty per cent. It thus became the Distribution-Preémption 
Bill, to which Tyler gave his assent, September 4, 1841. By its 
provisions, the proceeds of the land sales were to contribute ten 
per cent to the States in which the lands were sold, while the bal- 
ance, after paying the cost of administration of the system, should 
be distributed pro rata among all the States. But this distribution 
was to cease whenever the duties on imports should exceed twenty 
per cent. So preémption became a universal right under liberal 
conditions that lasted with little change for half a century. 

It was a typical Clay compromise; but the only part of it that 
lasted was the principle of preémption that he opposed. Before 
the law had any effective influence, Congress was driven to raise 
the rates and abandon the Compromise Tariff of 1833 because of 
the Treasury deficits that still lingered after the panic of 1837. A 
new high tariff was passed in 1842, and the distribution clauses 
therefore lapsed. Preémption became a settled policy and the year 
1841 assumed a significance in the development of the public 
domain equaled only by the years of the other basic laws, 1787, 
1800, and 1820. Under the preémption law, the frontiersmen who 
were thronging into the upper Mississippi valley and across the 
plains to the Pacific, and who were raising the density of settle- 
ment in all the public land States, found it less onerous to solve 
that basic problem of their life, the acquisition of a clear title to 
their land. 


CHAPTER XLIII 
THE FRONTIER OF THE FORTIES 


TuE State of California was the fruit of the manifest destiny that 
drove American settlers to the Pacific, and it took on its personal 
identity because of the accident that gold was found at the end of 
the rainbow that the migrants were pursuing. The fight that its 
admission to the Union entailed and that shaped the terms of re- 
construction of the rest of the territory conquered from Mexico, 
nearly wrecked the Union, and only Clay with his fertile compro- 
mise of principles, saved the day. In the Mississippi Valley, mean- 
while, the panic of 1837 was receding into the past. The great 
crest of land sales, reached in 1836, was a matter to be remem- 
bered, but not to be repeated. The high prices, induced in part by 
the flood of paper money, had subsided; and while deflation was, 
as always, painful to the debtor, the West was healthier when the 
deflation was accomplished. Two pairs of frontier States were 
added to the Union in the decade preceding the admission of Cali- 
fornia — Texas and Wisconsin, Iowa and Florida. The difficul- 
ties that the pioneers of Iowa and Wisconsin surmounted on their 
way to statehood illustrate the aftermath of panic in the Missis- 
sipp1 Valley. 

The Territory of Wisconsin was divided by Congress in the 
spring of 1838, and on the western side of the Mississippi River 
the “Iowa District” was given legal recognition as Iowa Territory. 
There were more than forty-one thousand settlers in the two 
territories north and west of Illinois by this time. They had nearly 
doubled in numbers within two years and were increasing more 
rapidly every day. The northern element among them was still 
small; but up the Mississippi and across the prairies from Indiana 
and Illinois larger numbers came from the southern bases of fron- 
tier growth. They were insistent upon home rule, and they had an 
additional reason for welcoming it, founded in the panic of 1837. 

The insane confidence that led the States into their internal im- 
provement schemes of 1836, and that made their voters believe 
the politicians who told them that every county could have its 
railroads at once, was gone before 1840. Instead they possessed 
now a burden of debts, for whose satisfaction they could not find 


THE FRONTIER OF THE FORTIES 393 


a means. The future, no longer rosy, was darkened by a promise 
of heavy taxes to pay back the squandered loans. Individual 
farmers, who had mortgaged their lands in the enthusiasm of the 
moment, discovered that the debt was frequently larger than the 
whole value of the property. .There was an exodus from Indiana 
and Illinois, made larger because of the desire to escape taxation. 
New immigrants from the East looked at the tax-rate and pushed 
on to further fields. The territories, Wisconsin and Iowa, profited 
by the dubious reputation of Illinois, and after 1837 found them- 
selves in hectic growth, doubling their numbers every few months. 

A movement for the dismemberment of Illinois is one of the 
evidences of the financial state of mind of the early forties. Any- 
where in the State, citizens were ready to give anything reason- 
able for relief from taxes. Neighbor States were dropping the 
burden and indulging in frank repudiation.! The northern coun- 
ties of Illinois, above the latitude of Chicago, reminded themselves 
that this portion of the State had been intended by Congress, in 
_ the Ordinance of 1787, to be a part of the fifth Northwest Terri- 
tory, Wisconsin. For several years their leaders talked of secession 
and annexation to a territory with a lower tax-rate. The move- 
ment came to naught, for no State may be divided without its con- 
sent, and no one fancied that Illinois would submit to partition. 
But the desire illustrates a frame of mind that helped along the 
speedy colonization of Iowa. | 

*‘Burlington 1s the largest, wealthiest, most business doing and 
most fashionable city, on or in the neighborhood of the Upper 
Mississippi...’ wrote a contributor to the Jowa Territorial Ga- 
zette, under the stimulus of the Fourth of July enthusiasm of 1840. 
“We have three or four churches, a theatre, and a dancing school 
in full blast.”” Well placed on the Mississippi, midway between 
the Des Moines and Iowa rivers, Burlington was a natural port of 
entry for the Black Hawk purchase. And when the great Sauk and 
Fox cession, made in 1842, opened the interior of the territory, 
the procession of settlers through the river gateways became an 
orderly mob. The children of the South predominated for some 
years, but in Iowa there was a larger admixture of long-distance 
migrants than was usual on the border, because by 1840 travel was 
entering upon its modern conditions. 

The river steamboats had begun to ascend the Upper Missis- 
sippi many years before Iowa attracted attention. One reached 

1 William A. Scott, The Repudiation of State Debts (1893). 


394 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the post at Fort Snelling as early as 1823. But not until the later 
thirties were these craft either numerous, safe, or cheap. By 1840, 
however, packets were plying regularly from Pittsburgh to all the. 
Ohio ports and St. Louis; and from St. Louis upstream to the head 
of navigation. Emigration ceased to be a matter of downstream 
drifting on a flatboat, or painful overland travel with the farm 
wagons and live stock across the prairies. The steamboat was 
quicker and not much more costly for those who were content to 
take deck passage. Among those who disembarked at the Iowa 
river towns were many for whom the frontier was a complete 
novelty, and whose homes were far away.’ 

Ephraim Adams and his “Jowa Band” composed one of the 
bodies that lessened the frontier uniformity of Iowa. His party was 
made up of Congregational ministers and their families, from Yale 
and Andover, who came on missionary duty. The foreign mission- 
ary associations were sending their representatives to Oregon, 
Hawaii, and the Far East; this was a home mission project and 
resulted in the opening at Grinnell of a little college that has con- 
tinuously stood for devotion and sound education. Its people, and 
their friends, made the frontier democracy of Iowa less completely 
Jacksonian than most of the Mississippi Valley was at this mo- 
ment. 

There were, nevertheless, fifty-one Democrats among the 
seventy-two delegates who gathered to frame a constitution for 
Iowa in October, 1844. At any time after 1840 there would have 
been abundant precedent for the formation of a State government, 
and more than once other territories had proceeded with the con- 
stituent work without waiting for Congress to enable them. In 
1840, and again in 1842, proposals for holding conventions, at the 
initiative of the governors who were ambitious for statehood, were 
rejected at the polls by the settlers; but in 1844 the project passed. 
The discussions in the convention that ensued give, as usual, a 
picture of the grievances that called for immediate remedy, and 
the modifications in basic law suggested by the experiences of the 
frontiers of the forties.® 

The debate over banks is the most instructive that the scanty 

Seymour Dunbar, A History of Travel in America (1915), has been less widely known 
than it deserves. In no other place is so varied a collection of cuts and descriptions of 
steamboats and other agencies of American transportation. 

% Benjamin F. Shambaugh, History of the Constitutions of Iowa (1902); he edited in 1907 


Proceedings of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Constitution of Iowa, in which there is a keen 
discussion of frontier ideas by Andrew C. McLaughlin. 


THE FRONTIER OF THE FORTIES 395 


records preserve, for the passion for bank notes had been succeeded 
by an aversion to banks of issue. The high prices and inflation of 
the boom period were justly attributed to overeasy banking, and 
the farmers, as a body, were imbued with a Jacksonian antipathy 
toward any bank. The merchants among the people, and the 
easterners, were less sweeping in their condemnation, but there 
were few as yet to take positive ground that banks were necessary 
tools of commerce. The constitution forbade the chartering of any 
bank without a referendum, and made the liability of stockholders 
extend beyond the amount of stock held, to the whole property of 
the stockholder. The application to corporations of this legal 
principle of partnership was of course destructive of the corpora- 
tion and was meant to be. 

The second of the great Iowa debates was over boundaries. As 
a territory, Iowa possessed the broad sweep of domain between 
the Mississippi and the Missouri, north of the State of Missouri. 
The convention did not expect to retain all this, but there were 
doubts as to what ought to be asked of Congress, and what might 
be obtained. The local opinion was in favor of a Mississippi 
frontage as far north as the St. Peter’s or Minnesota River and a 
western extension to the Missouri. With these ambitions, the 
boundary clause of the constitution was constructed. 

Congress, meanwhile, had other ideas. There was among the 
southern representatives a disposition to keep an Indian tract on 
the east bank of the Missouri, to limit the extension of Iowa as 
Arkansas had been limited by the reserves of the Five Civilized 
Tribes. It was necessary to admit Iowa, in order to make a balance 
for Florida, which was now declaring itself ready; but it was not 
necessary to make a huge free State in the Northwest. In March, 
1845, before the Iowa constitution had been submitted to the 
people, a bill passed Congress admitting Florida and Iowa, under 
the constitutions they had framed, but cutting down the bounda- 
ries of the latter to a strip along the Mississippi only, as far north 
as the mouth of the Mankato River. Curtailed both north and 
west in its territorial dimensions, lowa rejected the constitution, 
and put off admission. 

In the spring of 1846 a second constitutional convention met to 
revise the constitution of 1844, and to propose to Congress a com- 
promise boundary. The extension of the State to the Missouri 
River, south of the present northern boundary, was the new pro- 
posal, which Congress ratified in time for Iowa to become a State 


396 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


in December, 1846. The second constitution was changed only in 
details from that of 1844, and banks of issue were still forbidden. 
What opposition there was among the Iowa Whigs was inspired 
chiefly by this prohibition. 

Florida, which became a State under the original act of 1845, 
was like Maine, a detached eastern frontier at the date of its ad- 
mission. It had remained, protesting, in territorial status since 
1822. “The whole policy of this Government, and all the princi- 
ples upon which its institutions rest,” declared the Florida peti- 
tion, “‘are adverse to the long continuance of a Territorial Govern- 
ment over any portion of the citizens of the country.”’ But popu- 
lation had come in slowly. Much of the land was a tangle of swamp 
and forest and over what was arable there lay a cloud of Spanish 
titles and land claims. The reluctant Seminole, who agreed to 
emigrate and then recanted, made Florida a scene of prolonged 
warfare. The people framed a constitution upon their own initia- 
tive in 1838, which Congress put off accepting until its act of 1845. 
The New York Herald rejoiced in “Florida and Iowa as stars to 
the Union, which will secure a Democratic Senate for the support 
of the measures of the new administration.” The Arkansas Ban- 
ner echoed the thought: “‘It must be pleasing to every true-hearted 
democrat to contemplate the permanent triumph and establish- 
ment of his principles. Florida, and Iowa, which is large enough 
to be ultimately divided into two States, are both decidedly demo- 
cratic. Texas will come into the Union almost unanimously 
democratic. It, in not many years hence, will constitute four or 
five States — all of which will most certainly be democratic. ... 
It is certain, therefore, that whiggery is doomed —it has gone 
down with its great champion — while the star of democracy has 
ascended the political horizon never to go down again, but to 
brighten with the waste of years!”’ At the next census, in 1850, 
Florida had 87,445 inhabitants; Iowa 192,214. 

The “star of democracy ”’ that illumined the firmament in Iowa 
and Texas shone as well over the region between Lake Michigan 
and the Mississippi, which constituted Wisconsin Territory after 
the division of 1838. Before 1845 there were three settled areas 
within the territory, each with a distinct set of characteristics. 
In the southwest counties, it took a keen eye to see any difference 
between Wisconsin and the Iowa people across the Mississippi. 
They had nearly all ascended that stream in their homeseeking 
quest. They had much the same admixture of southern and middle 


THE FRONTIER OF THE FORTIES 397 


State forbears. They were Democrats and “ultra” in their demo- 
cracy. 

But the eastern limit of southwestern Wisconsin was in the 
vicinity of the Four Lakes, where Madison had become the terri- 
torial capital. Here Henry Dodge, himself one of the most typical 
of the southern entrants, presided as governor during the better 
part of Wisconsin’s territorial existence. East of Madison there 
was still in 1846 what a Milwaukee editor described as a “‘vacuum”’ 
extending thirty miles or more to Lake Mills; and by this vacuum 
of unoccupied frontier, eastern Wisconsin was separated from the 
West. 

Along the lake shore, Wisconsin was before 1846 an unbroken 
succession of towns from Green Bay to the Illinois line. Mil- 
waukee, the most important, was in caustic debate over the rela- 
tive prospects of Chicago and itself. And around or behind these 
towns were social influences far different from those of the remote 
frontier. The lake steamers brought their cargoes and their pas- 
-sengers directly from Buffalo; whither they had come from the 
seaboard States or the New York frontier. The South was at a 
discount; and here were to be found what were rare in the Missis- 
sippi Vailey — increasing colonies of foreign born. The German 
and Irish immigration that began in the forties provided thou- 
sands of settlers for the eastern Wisconsin towns and farms; and 
the Germans, indeed, talked of the possibility of founding a Ger- 
man State. 

In southeast Wisconsin was an overflow from Illinois and Indi- 
ana, of typical frontier character, but of slighter southern aspect 
than the Mississippi Valley stream. Its people were often the 
second generation of Erie Canal migrants, who had stopped for one 
generation on the northern slope of the Old Northwest. Or if they 
came of Kentucky stock, they were insulated by another genera- 
tion from the southern influence. In the southern counties along 
Lake Michigan, and up the valley of the Rock River and on the 
fertile plains between, they made a prosperous, conservative 
farmer population. 

The cleavage that was to wrack the political structure of the 
Northwest in the next two decades was already visible in Wiscon- 
sin. In 1844 a territorial abolition society was formed in Mil- 
waukee, and a southwestern politician hoped to fasten on the 
eastern leader of the Wisconsin Whigs “‘beyond all doubt, the 
charge of abolitionism.”’ It was in 1842, when a citizen of Rich- 


398 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


mond, Indiana, ventured to ask him what he thought of abolition- 
ism, that Henry Clay made his fatal response, ““Go home, Mr. 
Mendenhall, and mind your own business.” The settlers whom 
the North contributed to the Old Northwest were refusing to mix 
with those who derived their ideals from the South. 

In the summer of 1846, after various attempts at spontaneous 
statehood had been defeated in Wisconsin, Congress passed an 
enabling act, and for a third time reduced the area that the eternal 
compact in the Ordinance of 1787 had assigned to the last State to 
be constructed in the Old Northwest. The first reduction occurred 
when Illinois in 1818 was allowed its strip north of Chicago; the 
second when Michigan was compensated for the Toledo strip of 
which Ohio despoiled her, by the grant of the upper peninsula, 
between Lakes Superior and Michigan. Wisconsin was now cut 
short of the Mississippi River, which had been designed as her 
western limit, and was instead offered statehood only in case she 
would accept the St. Croix River as her boundary. This curtailing 
of Iowa and Wisconsin made room for an additional Mississippi 
Valley State (Minnesota), but caused real and reasonable dis- 
appointments. 

Like Iowa, Wisconsin made two constitutions before her in- 
habitants were satisfied, but the reasons for the rejection of the 
first basic law were different in the two cases.* Iowa choked over 
the boundary. In Wisconsin the different conceptions of the mean- 
ing of democracy, that have kept the State in continuous uproar 
since its creation, occasioned a struggle that was only partly set- 
tled when the second constitution was accepted in 1848. ‘‘There 
is a striking dissimilarity between the habits and customs of the 
people of the Mississippi Valley and the old Eastern States,” 
wrote a well-informed writer in the Wisconsin Democrat in 1846: 
*“‘the eastern and western portions of our Territory are made up 
principally of these divisions, hence there must of necessity exist 
strong prejudices between them which time and intercourse alone 
can eradicate.” 

There were noticeable among the delegates of the first conven- 
tion representatives of the “progressive Democracy,” who were 
Simon-pure Jacksonian extremists; of the “retrograding Demo- 


‘¥F. L. Paxson, “A Constitution of Democracy — Wisconsin, 1847,”’ in Mississvppi 
Valley Historical Review, vol. 1. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, fortunate in 
the services of Draper, Thwaites, Kellogg, Quaife, and Schafer, has published voluminous 
materials on the official and popular debates over the constitutions. 


THE FRONTIER OF THE FORTIES 399 


cracy,” who were disposed to question the eternal soundness of the 
Jacksonian financial program; and of the Whigs, who showed an 
eastern conservatism by being interested in property rights and 
believing in banks. The progressive Democrats were in control 
and offered to the territory a constitution forbidding the charter- 
ing of banks and the issuance of paper money, providing for elec- 
tive judges, allowing the farmer to save his homestead from judg- 
ment for debts, and securing to married women the possession and 
control of their property. These were principles by which to test 
the “ultraism of the age,”’ and they were all embodied in the con- 
stitution. There was an additional principle, of more political 
significance, in the requirement for the franchise of one year’s 
residence and an oath of allegiance to the United States. The 
eastern sections of Wisconsin were filling so rapidly with immi- 
grants that the western democrats foresaw themselves swallowed 
by a population of foreign antecedents and strove by this restric- 
tion to put off the evil day. 

_ ‘The issues were drawn over the constitution before the conven- 
tion adjourned and submitted the document to the people at the 
polls. Marshall M. Strong, of Racine, one of the Lake Michigan 
communities, was unable to restrain his indignation as the conven- 
tion inserted one radical article after another. He resigned his seat 
in the convention in disgust and went home to organize a coalition 
of “Retrograding Democrats” and Whigs, to fight the ratification 
of the constitution. He was successful. The alliance opposed with 
vigor the prohibition of banks and gave moral support to the 
aliens who wished to vote at once. The progressive Democrats, or 
“tadpoles” as their opponents called them, converted their senti- 
ments to verse of a sort: 


“The Federal party can’t endure, 
So much indulgence to the poor; 
The Bank Democracy begrudges 
The People’s power to choose their judges; 
The Married woman’s clause they say, 
With grief will turn each husband grey; 
But still the worst of all disasters, 
Is banishing their dear ‘shin-plasters.’” 


But singing did not help them, and the constitution went down, 

with only three counties in the territory giving it a majority. 
The year 1847 was devoted to reflection and party reorganiza- 

tion. Upon post-mortem analysis, it was seen that the definitive 


400 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


item in the rejection was the prohibition of banks. Every month 
the streams of immigrants emptied more thousands of eastern and 
foreign residents into the territory. The population of 30,945, of 
1840 swelled to one of 305,391 in 1850. The bank party wanted to 
make a new constitution, and the radical Democrats gave up their 
hope of defeating it. A Whig territorial delegate to Congress was 
chosen in September. Governor Dodge assembled the legislature 
in special session in October to call a convention once more, and in 
December this convention met in Madison. 

The second constitution, accepted in the spring of 1848, and still 
in force in 1923, was a sweeping revision of the first. Hardly a 
phrase came through unchanged. The alterations in intent were 
fewer, however; and the one of these that carried the new basic 
law to victory forbade the legislature to charter any bank until 
after a referendum on the subject; when, should the referen- 
dum be affirmative, they might construct a “‘general banking 
law,” which should be ineffective until ratified by the people at 
a general election. When, in 1852, this law was enacted and ap- 
proved, it may be said that the Mississippi Valley had passed 
through the wave of Jacksonian thought, and had begun to con- 
front the issues of a new generation. Wisconsin became the 
thirtieth State in May, 1848, and there was an appropriateness in 
the fact that one of the first senators was Henry Dodge, who found 
as a colleague at Washington his own son, Augustus Cesar Dodge, 
Senator from Iowa. 

The fight over the Wisconsin constitutions was a significant 
struggle that might have taught the politicians of the forties many 
useful things, had they possessed the insight to understand it. 
Thus far the settlements north of the Ohio River had been similar 
to and an outgrowth of those of the old West. The Jackson De- 
mocracy, and its imitation, the Harrison Whigs, grounded them- 
selves in the typical frontier experiences and prejudices. The 
further the frontier penetrated, the greater weight it acquired 
without changing its fundamental character. The diversion of its 
tendencies, due to the plantation and slave labor conditions of the 
cotton country, had attracted notice in the early twenties, and the 
Gulf States became a group apart. The diversion due to the flood- 
ing of the northern slope of the Old Northwest with northern and 
foreign immigrants was less promptly appreciated, for it was tak- 
ing place within the older States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. 
There were few who realized that in a few years the control of these 


THE FRONTIER OF THE FORTIES 401 


States would be in contest, and that they would be forever lost to 
southern political manipulations. In Wisconsin, in 1848, there 
was eastern influence enough to defeat the banking prohibition, 
which had come to be regarded as typical among the Jacksonian 
constitutions. Every western State north of Kentucky under these 
Jacksonian influences made a constitutional revision after 1837. 
Wisconsin gave the first decisive check. It was still possible in 
both Iowa and Wisconsin to send two Democrats to the Senate 
upon the first election, but the votes that wanted banks were 
growing and could not be permanently satisfied with Democrats. 
In the presidential election of 1848, Taylor, the Whig, was elected 
without getting the electoral vote of any of the five Northwest 
States, or of Iowa. Yet Lincoln, in 1860, carried every one of them. 
The struggle in Wisconsin was merely an opening skirmish in the 
political battle that was to increase in deadly intensity for a dozen 
years. 

Although the Mississippi Valley was largely unconscious of the 
changes in political balance that were impending, it felt that it 
was growing away from the primitive conditions of the first mi- 
grations. The rivers were crowded with steamboats, and the 
politicians had given up preaching that turnpikes would be the 
economic salvation of the country. The canal period had come 
and gone. The high hopes that surrounded the completion of the 
Erie Canal (1825), and the Ohio Canal (1832), had evaporated 
before the Illinois-Michigan Canal became an accomplished fact, 
in the year of the Wisconsin admission. A new era was opening 
dazzling promises of wealth and growth. In the same year, 1848, 
what may be regarded as the first through railroad of the West 
made a complete line of communication between Lake Erie and 
the Ohio, from Sandusky to Cincinnati. The railroad age became 
a reality in the same decade in which the party of Andrew Jackson 
lost its grip. | 


CHAPTER XLIV 
THE RAILROAD AGE 


“The Valley of the Mississippi: The greatest in the world, take it 
allin all. Situated as it is, between the two oceans, it will yet com- 
mand the commerce of the world, and that commerce may be 
centred in New Orleans.” This was the toast that John C. Cal- 
houn gave at a banquet in the St. Charles Hotel at New Orleans, 
in the fall of 1845, before he took passage on the S.S. Marie to 
ascend the Mississippi to Memphis. At Memphis he was due to 
attend the great railroad convention where politicians and busi- 
ness men of the Middle West and South dazzled themselves with 
glimpses of the future and sought to find ways and means to bring 
the West in line with the railroad movement that was at the mo- 
ment sweeping the world. 

It was an anachronism of some interest that the statesman of 
reaction should have thought to attach himself to the forefront of 
progress. A constructive politician in his youth, Calhoun in middle 
life devoted his logical intellect to building a defensive philosophy 
around States’ rights and slavery; and felt bound, therefore, to 
oppose whatever development of society seemed likely to interfere 
with State sovereignty. Yet in 1845 he thought it worth while to 
make the laborious journey from his Soutk Carolina home to 
Mississippi, to New Orleans, and to Memphis, to engage in rail- 
road propaganda. He was for the moment at leisure. With the 
termination of the Tyler Administration in March, he had vacated 
the office of Secretary of State, and he was not yet returned by his 
loyal State to his seat in the United States Senate. Some thought 
that he was looking forward to the presidential nomination of 
1848, and a cynic wrote from Washington a little later: ““Suppose 
you get up a great North Western convention [at Chicago], and 
invite him [Calhoun] to attend it,” he will find a constitutional 
way to improve not only the Mississippi, but the northern lakes 
and harbors. Certainly he was not blind to the hold that the rail- 
road movement had acquired over the western mind, or to the 
fact that no southern statesman was likely to be elected President 
unless he could capture the imagination or interest of the West. 

It was no new thing for transportation to be close to western 


THE RAILROAD AGE 403 


interest. In the fundamental analysis of border life, after the 
procuring of the land itself, and the capital with which to develop 
it, the marketing of the crop contained the key to prosperity. The 
bulky agricultural staples of the West constituted nearly the sole 
produce that could be converted into money with which to pay 
debts or buy land. They could not be sold or consumed at home. 
Their bulk and weight made them costly to move to distant 
markets. Whatever device promised to lessen freight rates, 
whether by roads, or vehicles, or by the legal control of the car- 
riers, was certain of a western hearing, and almost certain to 
inspire a western movement in politics. The National Road and 
the canals between tidewater and the western rivers had had their 
day, yet the attainment of wealth and happiness were still the 
mirages that lured the West from election to election. 

The broadening use of steam was the promise that inspired the 
new movement and brought the frontier, almost for the first time, 
into contact with the industrial revolution. This revolution — 
the change from hand work to the use of power machinery — began 
after the invention of the stationary engine in the eighteenth 
century and made Western Europe a new world. It cut it off 
sharply from all preceding history, altering the habits of workers, 
the distribution of population, and the application of capital. It 
increased the amount of manufactured goods, at a cheapening 
cost and thereby added to the physical comfort of every life. 

It not only cut Europe off from its past, by the sharp change in 
conditions, but it cut it off from contemporary America. The open 
frontier and the abundance of land made it hard to drive Ameri- 
cans into factories; and the scarcity of American capital made the 
rise of manufactures doubly slow. By 1850, America was at least 
fifty years behind Europe, with reference to the industrial revolu- 
tion, and many of the differences between American and European 
civilization, noticeable to all, were consequences of this. 

But when the industrial revolution passed from power machin- 
ery to locomotion, when the stationary engine was adapted into 
the traveling engine, America took hold more rapidly; for there 
were more premiums to be gained by quick transport in America. 
than by manufacture. The experiments of George Stephenson 
with steam locomotives, from his Blucher (1815) to his Rocket 
(1830), were watched in America as eagerly as at home; and before 
his Rocket was put in regular use on the Liverpool and Manchester 
Railway, the American railroad movement had begun. It was ona 


404 HISCORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


different scale indeed from that of England or France, for capital 
was scarce and distances were huge. In a sparsely settled country, 
the effort to build any railroad was of necessity extreme; and to 
build it well was out of the question. 

The Baltimore and Ohio and the South Carolina railroads were 
the first of consequence in the United States and were built under 
conditions that were experimental as to roadbed, track, motive 
power, rolling stock, and financial organization. Their builders 
acquired more valuable experience than they did profit. But be- 
tween the year in which the Baltimore and Ohio broke ground 
(1828), and that in which the Preémption Act was passed (1841), 
every center of population along the seaboard began to build its 
roads. 

The early railroads, almost without exception, were as local as 
the turnpikes had been. Where there was already a profitable 
traffic, it was profitable to project a railroad. Because of engineer- 
ing difficulties, few of the early lines crossed large rivers. Their 
builders preferred, instead, to radiate from the cities up into the 
country which they supplied, and from which they drew their 
provisions. The growing coal industry north of Philadelphia pro- 
vided an incentive for various roads tributary to that city and 
New York. Only by accident did the railroads, in the early period, 
connect two cities of similar importance. When such connections 
were made and through circuits were provided, it may be said 
with reason that the preliminary period of railroading had ended. 

During 1841, Boston became connected with Albany as nearly 
as this could be done by rail. There was a local line from Boston to 
Worcester, another running west from Worcester to the Berkshires 
at West Stockbridge, and a third thence to Greenbush, on the 
Hudson, opposite Albany. A ferry trip was unavoidable, as well 
as two changes of cars, for the traveler who desired to make the 
journey. But such travelers could not be squeamish, and for an- 
other generation journeys by rail were attended by many of the 
inconveniences of stage coach travel. 

It became possible in the next year to push through from 
Albany to Buffalo, although the corporate grouping known as the 
New York Central Lines was still a projection of the future. But 
it required perseverance to make this trip, for the lines involved 
were the Mohawk and Hudson, Utica and Schenectady, Syracuse 
and Utica, Auburn and Syracuse, Auburn and Rochester, Tona- 
wanda, and Attica and Buffalo. At every terminal point there 


THE RAILROAD AGE — 405 


was a change of cars, a delay in making connections, and generally 
a change of gauge. Inn-keepers felt that it was their perquisite 
to entertain the traveler overnight between trains, and it was 
common for the roads to arrange schedules with this in view. As 
late as 1854 the citizens of Erie, Pennsylvania, rioted and de- 
stroyed trackage when the two roads meeting there made a stand- 
ard gauge connection and proposed to run their cars through with- 
out delay. 

But after 1841 the number of through routes in the eastern 
States became so numerous that both travel and freight shipment 
acquired increased speed. The next dozen years are those of the 
trunk line competitions, in which the period of canal rivalries 
among the eastern cities is duplicated by a period of railroad 
rivalry for access to the interior markets. 

The Baltimore and Ohio was projected as a trunk line at its 
inception, but it was hindered by inexperience, lack of means, and 
panic, and only in 1852 was pushed to the Ohio River. It was five 
years more before there was a continuation west of the Ohio to 
Cincinnati and St. Louis. The northern trunk lines, started later, 
reached their destinations with less vexatious delay. These were 
the Grand Trunk, the New York Central, the Erie, and the Penn- 
sylvania, all lying north of the Baltimore and Ohio; and the Mem- 
phis and Charleston and the line from Richmond to Chattanooga 
lying south, with the Vicksburg road still incomplete at the out- 
break of the Civil War. 

The Grand Trunk, a Canadian road, with open water outlet at 
Portland, Maine, and western terminus at Port Huron in Ontario, 
was, after its completion in 1853, as important in the development 
of the American Northwest as though it were the possessor of a 
roadbed entirely within the United States. The New York Cen- 
tral, next south, was built up by consolidation of the local lines 
along the Mohawk route, and operated until 1853 against the 
harsh competition of the State-owned Erie Canal. Its superior 
grades, and the uniformly fertile valleys that it traversed, gave it 
such advantages, however, that if traffic with the interior of the 
United States were determined by competition alone, the New 
York Central would outstrip all competitors, and the metropolis 
of New York City would be even more overwhelming than it is. 

The Erie was a single project, between the Hudson River oppo- 
site New York City, and Dunkirk on Lake Erie. It served a tier of 
southern New York counties that had not derived benefit from the 


406 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Erie Canal, and struggled for many years against the handicap 
imposed by the State, that did not propose willingly to allow any 
railroad to compete with the canal. It was begun in 1835, and 
finished sixteen years later at a moment when, by accident, a 
citizen of Western New York, Millard Fillmore, was President of 
the United States. The ceremonial train that was run to commem- 
orate the opening was a worthy follower of the Seneca Chief that 
bore DeWitt Clinton and his associates east from Buffalo in 1825. 
It was the first railroad, under a single management, to bridge the 
gap between the Atlantic and the interior waters, and is thus the 
earliest trunk line. 

The Pennsylvania Railroad was chartered in 1846, and bought 
from the discouraged State the entire plant of the system of in- 
ternal improvements that had been completed twelve years earlier. 
It built a railroad from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and by 1852 
was running trains, broken only by a short stage link at the sum- 
mit of the Appalachians, where the tunnel was still under con- 
struction. The tracks ran through unbroken in 1854. The Balti- 
more and Ohio was the southernmost of the northern trunk lines, 
with a course almost entirely north of the Ohio and the Potomac. 

The southern trunk lines were of necessity longer and more ex- 
pensive than those of the North. There was for them no water 
route comparable to that of the Great Lakes or the Ohio River, to 
shorten the railroad distance between tidewater and interior navi- 
gation. ‘They must be built all the way from the coast to the 
Mississippi in order to function with success. From the thirties 
the project of a Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad excited the 
southwestern imagination, but it came to naught. Piecemeal, a 
series of lines came to life from the Chesapeake to Richmond, and 
thence west, and up the Great Valleys to Knoxville and Chatta- 
nooga. Hence the western end of the Memphis and Charleston 
made connection with the Mississippi River; while the main line 
of the Memphis and Charleston gave to Charleston an interior 
connection in substitution for the one she had sought at Cincin- 
nati.! The Vicksburg road, through Jackson and Montgomery to 
Atlanta and Savannah, was not a factor in the railroad era before 
the Civil War. 

In the building of the trunk *ines there is shown the keenness of 
the eastern cities for improved intercourse with the West; simul- 


1 St. George L. Sioussat, ‘Memphis as a Gateway to the West,’’ in Tennessee Historical 
Magazine, 1917. 


THE RAILROAD AGE 407 


taneously the local western lines were born, to serve local needs or 
to connect with the trunk lines, or both. 

Where the first railroad of the West was built is an antiquarian 
matter of some uncertainty. At the moment of the panic of 1837 
there were several small projects under construction, and at least 
one possessed both track and a steam locomotive. This was the 
Erie and Kalamazoo, which was open from Toledo to Adrian. Its 
locomotive, the Adrian No. I, arrived by boat at Toledo in June, 
1837. But there was no railroading of any significance in the West 
before the panic, and none after it for a decade. Not until 1847 
was there a western line connecting two points of importance; or a 
thoroughfare between the Lakes and the Ohio before 1848. 

The Indianapolis and Madison, eighty-six miles long, was put in 
operation during 1847, at the close of which year the United 
States possessed 3205 miles of track, with 660 nominally operating 
in the Northwest. The map of the year shows the mileage radiat- 
ing mostly from the towns at the head of Lake Erie. The road that 
first reached a through connection was the Mad River and Lake 
Erie, which joined, at Springfield, Ohio, a road to Cincinnati. 
Sandusky, the Lake terminus of this first through road, was driven 
to railroad building by the political decision in Ohio which left its 
citizens without the advantage of a canal port. In the rest of Ohio 
there were no other important railroads even begun, for the Ohio 
Canal, and the Miami and Wabash canals traversed the regions 
of largest population and wealth and retarded railroad enthusiasm. 
Sandusky, piqued at this neglect, built the railroad for itself, and 
there were some weeks after the summer of 1848 in which the 
shortest way from the East to St. Louis was by New York, the 
Hudson, the Erie Canal, the Lake Erie steamboat, the Mad River 
Railroad, and the Ohio River steamer. After this date, the canals 
fell rapidly into desuetude, with declining use, and with revivals 
more for political effect than to serve an economic end. It has 
never yet been possible for an inland water highway in the United 
States to recover its ascendency once a railroad has paraileled 
it. The Erie Canal, the Ohio River, the Great Lakes, and even 
the Mississippi have all had their periods of dominance and of 
eclipse. 

In addition to the desire to provide railroad service for a given 
locality, the western railroads engaged in a race for the prizes in 
terminal advantage which were Chicago and Indianapolis. In this 
they were able to secure eastern backing, since the trunk lines 


408 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


were not content to touch the Ohio or the Lakes and desired to 
push through to Chicago or to the Mississippi. In the next four 
years after the opening of the Mad River Railroad nearly nineteen 
hundred more miles of track were put in use beyond the Ohio 
River. The lines ran southwest from Cleveland and Sandusky, 
through Cincinnati and Indianapolis, and as far as Terre Haute 
on the Wabash. From Toledo and Detroit they ran almost due 
west around the tip of Lake Michigan to Chicago. 

The race for Chicago is a dramatic story of the years 1848-1852.? 
The beginning is laid in the hopes of the fresh young common- 
wealth of Michigan, expressed through its earliest legislature in 
1837, for three parallel railroads across the lower peninsula, from 
Monroe, Detroit, and Port Huron. Work was started on the south- 
ern and central of these lines, and in the early forties the State 
faced bankruptcy because of its enthusiasms. The unfinished pub- 
lic works were sold to private companies that assumed the names 
of Michigan Southern and Michigan Central and resumed con- 
struction, with Chicago as a goal. 

The State of Indiana lay as an obstruction in the way of success 
for either of these lines. They could not get to Chicago except 
across that part of Indiana that touches Lake Michigan; and with- 
out a legislative franchise they could not even enter the State. 
Indiana was reluctant to grant the right. Its chief interest lay in 
the development of the central part of the State, around Indian- 
apolis, and the southern end. It saw no advantage in being party 
to the elevation of Chicago as a potential rival for western ascend- 
ency. The legislature accordingly refused charters for the Michi- 
gan roads, and these felt driven to devious means of accomplishing 
their purpose. ‘The New Albany and Salem, a line which Indiana 
had already chartered, was induced by the Michigan Central to 
build and lease a small piece of track from the Michigan State line 
to that of Illinois. The Northern Indiana did the same for the 
Michigan Southern, and in the spring of 1852 both Michigan lines 
entered Illinois. They did not go into Chicago over their own 
tracks, but prevailed upon the Illinois Central Railroad and the 
Chicago and Rock Island to allow them as non-competitors, to use 
their respective stations and terminals. West of Chicago local 

2 F. L. Paxson, “‘ The Railroads of the ‘Old Northwest’ before the Civil War,”’ in Wis- 


eonsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, Transactions, vol. xvu, has annual sketch 
maps. A group of Wisconsin students, R. E. Riegel, R.S. Cotterill, and F. W. Prescott, 
are now in collaboration upon a graphic and statistical history of all the ante-bellum rail- 
roads of the United States, 


THE RAILROAD AGE 409 


lines had already built as far as Rockford, on the Rock River, 
near the Wisconsin line. 

By the end of 1852 the lines tributary to Lake Erie had swept 
west and southwest across the Old Northwest. By the end of 1853 
Chicago had a connection with St. Louis and a fairly direct one with 
Indianapolis. In 1857 the Ohio and Mississippi was completed 
from St. Louis to Cincinnati, there to meet the Cincinnati and 
Marietta; and across the Ohio from Marietta was a through line 
east over the Baltimore and Ohio. By the end of 1860, the last 
building season before the Civil War, there were 9514 miles of 
railroad in the Old Northwest, out of some 30,000 miles of rail- 
road in all the United States. The Northwest was covered with a 
close-meshed railroad net that brought good transportation within 
hauling distance of nearly every occupied farm. Grand Haven on 
Lake Michigan, La Crosse on the Mississippi, and St. Joseph on 
the Missouri constituted the railroad frontier, and a line connect- 
ing them falls not far from what was the agricultural frontier as 
well. Prior to 1860 the advance of the agricultural frontier was 
determined by the natural roads, aided as far as might be by the 
navigable rivers. But now that the railroad had caught up, the 
future was to be a different story, with population spread and dis- 
persion accelerated because of ease of movement, and with the 
general shift and advance of the frontier determined, not by the 
horde of individual homeseekers, but by the conditions under 
which new railroad lines could acquire the financial means of 
existence. Finance and transport did not cease to be vital in weste- 
ern economy; but they changed their technique. 


CHAPTER XLV 
LAND GRANTS AND THE WESTERN ROADS 


Tue peculiar features of the camp meeting — its concentration of 
interest, its emotionalism, and its reliance upon mob psychology 
— were more fruitfully applied in matters of religion and politics 
than in those of business. In the great western revival at the open- 
ing of the nineteenth century it was discovered that the ac- 
cumulated emotions of the frontier could be released in camp, 
under the exhortations of powerful preachers, and that the frontier 
families, wearied with the loneliness of their habitual existence, 
welcomed the chance to lay aside for a time their worldly affairs 
and devote themselves to intense doses of religious experience. 
The religion of the West was shaped by this discovery, and there- 
after those churches flourished best whose methods permitted 
them to take advantage of it. 

The politics of the West grew up under somewhat similar condi- 
tions. The political leader on the stump bore close resemblance in 
method of life and type of persuasion to the itinerant preacher. 
The audiences that were collected to listen to party speeches were 
lusty under punishment, and absorbed long hours of eloquence. 
It was not worth while to leave home and travel half a day or 
more for a short speech. The parson preached morning and after- 
noon, to congregations that made a day of it. The politician did 
the same; and at moments of keen political excitement, meetings 
were organized that lasted not a few hours but several days, until 
the countryside was impregnated with political emotion. The 
Whig campaign of 1840 was conducted like a religious revival, 
taking its cue from the Jackson movement of a dozen years before. 
Both movements were alive with grand intangibles and heroic 
virtues, whose effect upon the mind was semi-religious, and whose 
propagation went best under the conditions that the recurrent 
camp meetings had made universal in the West. The rise of the 
convention method in the United States, whether used for polities, 
religion, or business, appears to have a close connection with this 
frontier trait. | 

When the camp meeting was applied to the promotion of rail- 
roads, its efficacy broke down. It was productive of conviction but 


LAND GRANTS AND THE WESTERN ROADS 411 


not of cash; and without cash, and the capital for which it stood, 
the best of convictions made no railroads. As early as 1836, Rob- 
ert Y. Hayne of South Carolina was in the chair of a convention 
at Knoxville, to discuss the “great southern railroad” from Cin- 
cinnati to Charleston, and to find ways and means for its immedi- 
ate construction. The belief was still prevalent that the United 
States had reached its growth. On the western border the Indian 
reservations made a nearly solid barrier beyond Missouri. General 
Gaines was using his ingenious mind in the elaboration of a system 
of radiating railroads to police the Indian Frontier, and Congress 
was accepting the idea of the great western road from Red River to 
Lake Superior. The southern politicians were aware that their 
hold on the West would be improved if they could create economic 
bonds that would operate for them as the Erie Canal was doing 
for New York; and that without these bonds they might be left 
stranded with the lapse of time. 

But although it was easy to establish the conviction that there 

ought to be a Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad, no railroad was 
forthcoming, for the southern system produced little free capital 
for investment, and northern capital was finding abundant profit- 
able use at home. The great southwestern convention of 1845 
was a renewed attempt to give vitality to southern and western 
transportation, with Calhoun in the chair this time, instead of 
Hayne. There were said to have been at Memphis nearly six hun- 
dred delegates, from sixteen States, with local auditors who filled 
every corner of the Methodist Church, where the convention sat. 
The resolutions that they passed make clear their need for im- 
provement of the rivers and the building of connecting railroads, 
but show no conviction on either of the vital matters of capital or 
constitutionality. The South could not control the former, and 
could not turn to the National Treasury with confidence as the 
West could do, because of its denial of the right of the Govern- 
ment at Washington to make internal improvements. 

There were eighteen States, instead of sixteen as at Memphis, 
whose delegates met in Chicago on July 5, 1847, to discuss western 
improvements from a different angle.! The local press prided itself 
upon the fact that this was really a general movement and not so 


1 Robert S. Cotterill has made the most intimate study of the railroad conventions, pub- 
lishing his conclusions in ‘‘Southwestern Railroads and Western Trade,’ in Mississippi 
Valley Historical Review, 1917, and ‘‘Memphis Railroad Convention, 1849,’’ in Tennessee 
Historical Magazine, 1918. 


412 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


sectional as that of the Memphis gathering. Horace Greeley him- 
self was there, as correspondent of his New York Tribune, now six 
years old, and as propagandist for a closer dependence of the Ohio 
Valley upon the Middle Seaboard States. The gathering had a 
strong Whig flavor too, whereas Memphis was generally Demo- 
cratic. It also had a specific animus, contributed to it by the 
President of the United States. 

In the preceding summer James K. Polk approved the free trade 
tariff of 1846, and spread despair among the northern Whigs. He 
followed this by a veto, in August, of a river and harbor bill, upon 
which the hopes of the West were founded. “By one dash of 
James K. Polk’s pen our prosperity has been checked — our hopes 
crushed, in defiance too, of the votes of both Houses of Congress 
and the known will of the people,” was the wail of the Milwaukee 
Sentinel. 'The bill thus blocked carried appropriations for deepen- 
ing river channels, and protecting harbors everywhere in the West. 
In deliberating upon it, Polk had an appreciation of the difficulties 
of a President elected by a coalition of western and southern votes, 
for the internal improvements that were the West’s meat were the 
South’s poison. He was as determined, however, as any of the 
Scotch Irish on the frontier in which he had been bred, and stuck to 
the course he mapped out for himself. 

The Chicago Convention, twenty-three hundred strong, it is 
said, exhorted the country to the improvement of rivers and har- 
bors, and the completion of the intersectional railroad lines; and 
in the following year the first piece of railroad iron was spiked 
down within the limits of Chicago. It headed towards Galena, 
while at the same time the roads in Michigan were gathering up 
their strength for the race for Chicago and the traffic of the 
prairies. 

The local conventions were innumerable after this time. They 
preached the same doctrine, and revealed the same universal facts 
that the West had little capital for investment, and the South 
almost none at all. The typical procedure, when a line was incor- 
porated and a company organized, was for the president of the 
railroad to print his stock certificates and carry them east, or to 
Kurope, to peddle them around the haunts of concentrated wealth, 
in the hope that some magnate might be induced to buy them at a 
discount, and thus enter upon a speculation that might work to 
the development of some part of the interior of the United States. 

At St. Louis, in October, 1849, was a third of the conventions of 


LAND GRANTS AND THE WESTERN ROADS 413 


propaganda. Thomas Hart Benton was the presiding genius of 
this demonstration, and he had by this date convinced himself 
that he was the political patron of far-western railroads. Always 
interested in the development of the remote frontier, Benton, 
from his first entrance into the Senate in 1821, was its spokesman. 
He had seen the trade to Santa Fé rise and Oregon become a fact. 
Slower than some to visualize the possibility of a railroad to the 
Pacific, he had now been impressed by its probability. With 
grand oratorical gesture, he pointed to the Far East and India, 
and showed how it could be made tributary to the United States 
if only there were a railroad to the Columbia River; and how St. 
Louis was the natural junction point for such a road with the 
Mississippi River system. Missouri laid down its first track in 
1851 and had a transverse railroad to St. Joseph by 1859, but still 
the excitement and the resolves failed to uncover the ways and 
means of wholesale railroad building. With all the noise and prop- 
aganda, there was but one railroad of any consequence in the West 
before 1849. | 

It was a difficult matter throughout the United States to get the 
railroad movement started, but every obstacle, except the intel- 
lectual adherence to older methods because they were older, was 
stronger in the West than elsewhere throughout the Union. The 
more specific problems, to be attacked before the railroad net 
could become a fact, were how to raise the capital, the form of the 
debt, the control of expenditure, and the relation of the railroad 
to politics and the State. 
- There had been few large capitalistic adventures in the United 
States or in the world, before the advent of the railroad movement, 
and most of the wealth of society was in the hands of its owners, 
to be invested in driblets upon the simpler projects of trade and 
manufacture. The State was nowhere in business. Except for 
purposes of war, where every nation borrowed what it could and 
took by taxation what it was able to collect, there were few occa- 
sions when society needed to get together large sums of fluid 
capital. Before the rise of the factory system, the world got along 
through small business, with the individual or the partnership 
quite able to finance the ventures. Such a concern as the East 
India Company, or the other huge trading corporations of the 
period of colonial expansion, were more like states within states 
than they were like private business, and in general they provided 
no precedent for the growth of private commerce. In America 


414. HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


they actually evolved into self-governing commonwealths, and in 
India into an independent government. No line of continuity that 
they founded runs unbroken into the big business of the twentieth 
century. 

There was no need for the financial machinery of large enter- 
prises so long as the enterprises were small. When, however, the 
construction of roads, canals, and railroads began to arouse an 
interest, and it became apparent that no single capitalist, or even 
partnership, could provide the total, or would incur the whole risk, 
the promoters of the new era set about to find a means of assem- 
bling enough capital for the task, and to devise methods of making 
the speculations safe and profitable. 

The number of conceivable methods of raising the needful mil- 
lions was small: the State might take from the people by taxation, 
it might borrow from the wealthy and repay out of either taxes or 
anticipated earnings, it might persuade Congress to do either of 
these, or it might allow many individuals to contribute small sums 
through the medium of some kind of joint stock enterprise. In 
fact, each of these methods was used, but as time went on, society 
passed into a period of corporation finance, in which in addition to 
all the uncertainties about the primary ventures there were added 
the uncertainties about the organization and working of corpora- 
tions as tools of enterprise. 

The Cumberland and National Roads were built by the United 
States, out of proceeds of taxation and the sale of public lands, but 
Congress declined to follow up the precedent thus set, and turned 
deaf ears to appeals on behalf of the Erie Canal, and most of the 
later flood of special improvements. Jackson’s veto of the Mays- 
ville Turnpike Bill became a classic upon the dangers involved in 
public participation in local improvements. Certain sorts of 1m- 
provements of rivers and harbors Congress was willing to carry 
out at public cost, and the bill for these grew into a public scandal, 
but it stayed shy of ventures that were projected as remunerative 
investments. The States were less self-restrained in these ways 
than Congress and learned an abiding lesson during the panic of 
1837. Thereafter it became almost impossible to interest a State 
in an improvement at its direct cost, until the day of the autoino- 
bile arrived to bring back the period of wide-open roadmaking. 

Occasionally Congress was prevailed upon, in the earlier phases 
of the railroad movement, to buy a block of stock in an enterprise, 
as a public contribution. Thus the Portland Canal at Louisville, 


LAND GRANTS AND THE WESTERN ROADS 415 


and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad received a modicum of aid. 
But this in principle was even more dangerous than direct con- 
struction, for it incurred the risk while leaving the management in 
private and often irresponsible hands. The States were more gen- 
erous in this direction and less conservative; and in the excitement 
of the new movement they passed laws authorizing the minor gov- 
ernmental districts, like towns or counties, to bond themselves and 
invest the proceeds in railroad stocks. The promoters of the roads 
stressed always the quasi-public character of the work, as they 
sought aid, and pointed out the scarcity of private wealth; but as 
the enterprises took shape, the public bodies who financed them 
found that the profits, if any, were likely to take a private direc- 
tion. After the panic of 1837 it became less easy to induce any 
governmental division to place its credit in the hands of private 
promoters. | 

There was left the joint stock corporation. Year after year the 
legislative bodies that had passed through an era of bank charters 
were approached by agents solicitous for railroad charters. It was 
often true that these had no funds in hand and no promise of any, 
but they asked and the legislatures granted permission to build 
roads, with terminals often vaguely stated, or not at all, and cor- 
porate privileges loosely drawn and filled with “jokers”’ behind 
which the promoters could take refuge when their sins came home. 
The legislatures, in this traffic, suffered the same injuries to their 
morale and prestige that they suffered when lands were formerly 
sold by private law or banks were so incorporated. The progress of 
American legislation from special to general laws on banking and 
incorporation, runs through the first half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury and is accompanied by a noticeable improvement in conduct 
and ethical standards. The harsh experience that taught legisla- 
tures to abandon the practice of private legislation was much of it 
acquired during the railroad boom between 1841 and 1857. 

Once the charter was voted, the promoters were at liberty to sell 
stocks and bonds with almost no restraint. There was no general 
public scrutiny upon issues. The law of corporate liability was so 
inadequately worked out that creditors could not know how far it 
was safe to advance funds. In some of the States, the earliest 
corporation laws made every stockholder personally responsible 
for all the debts of the corporation, thus passing on the principle 
of the partnership to the stock company. The effect of this was to 
make a person of wealth unwilling to subscribe to the stock of any 


416 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


company, lest he be required to “hold the basket” when the affair 
fell through. The principle of limited liability of shareholders to an 
amount pro rata with the number of shares held, was gradually 
established. In some States there was double or triple liability, 
but the general rule eventually made the stockholder responsible 
only for what his stock actually called for. 

But with liability fixed, there was no way of controlling the 
price at which stock was sold or to insure to any buyer fair treat- 
ment with his associates. The bonded debt was equally uncertain. 
As soon as a new company acquired any property there was a 
temptation to mortgage it, nominally to advance the business but 
often to rob the treasury. Bonds were marketed at the discretion 
of officials. The shareholder in an early railroad corporation ran a 
small chance of receiving dividends on his investment, but was 
almost certain to receive a valuable and costly education in the 
methods of experimental corporation finance. The engineering 
methods involved in making a roadbed were still experimental; the 
mechanical principles of steam locomotion were in large measure 
conjectural; the corporate mechanism was still on its trial trip. It 
is no wonder that the thirty thousand miles of railroad before the 
Civil War were generally built at a loss, often became a matter of 
disgrace, and occasionally grew into a gross public scandal. 

Throughout the United States the railroad movement was at- 
tended with these uncertainties and difficulties. In the West they 
took on an aggravated form because of the general scarcity of 
capital. It was an added disadvantage of the West that much of 
the ownership of its railroads was absentee in character, due to the 
sale of stocks and bonds in the markets far away from home. This 
bred misunderstanding, for the investor cared little for anything 
beyond his dividends, and had slight personal knowledge of the 
conditions of the country upon whose prosperity he held his 
mortgage. 

Extreme cases that help to explain the later attitude of the West 
toward corporations, may be found in the Yankton bonds and the 
Watertown mortgages. In the former instance, a county in Da- 
kota Territory bonded itself to aid a promised railroad. The offi- 
cers of the road took the bonds, disposed of them in the East and 
built no road. When the time came to pay the principal and inter- 
est on the bonds, the farmer issuers, oppressed by a sense of the 
grave injustice done them, could not see why they should be held 
to meet the obligation. In the East, in consequence, the idea 


LAND GRANTS AND THE WESTERN ROADS 417 


spread that the West was willing to repudiate its debts; the West 
was confirmed in its notion of the dishonesty of corporations and 
the rapacity of creditors. 

The Watertown mortgages were a Wisconsin issue.” —They were 
first mortgages on farms along the line of a proposed railroad. The 
promoters had sold the farmers stock, taking the mortgages in re- 
turn, for the farmers had no cash to subscribe. The mortgages 
found eastern buyers, yet the road remained a dream. The ag- 
grieved farmers sought by every means to evade the payment of 
the mortgages on the ground that they had been defrauded, as 
indeed they were. And before the matter was settled by a final 
compromise, the misunderstandings between the sections had been 
intensified and made more permanent. 

The devices to which western communities were driven to 
finance their railroads were so extreme that a political premium 
was placed upon whatsoever ingenuity should discover a means of 

shifting the burden. In the end they turned to Congress, following 
a well-traveled line of thought that the West has used whenever it 
has felt a need. They persuaded themselves, and then their rulers, 
that the public lands afforded a proper source for an endowment of 
railroad construction, and after 1850 there began a period of 
wholesale land grants inspired by this idea. 

There was no novelty in looking to Congress and the land for 
help. The appropriation of a part of the proceeds of the land sales 
to the construction of roads, was as old as the century. Not only 
did the West look automatically to the lands as an available en- 
dowment for schools, universities, and State institutions, but Con- 
gress as an owner of land was held to have an even interest with 
the States in whatever should increase the value of real property, 
and there was no doubt that railroads would accomplish this. 

The full history of the appropriation of public lands for internal 
improvements would include innumerable grants of the actual 
Jand needed for the construction through the public domain of 
roads and canals.? No such enterprise could be executed in the 
West without crossing Government property, and Congress al- 
ways granted the necessary right of way. When railroads made 

2 Fred Merk, Economie History of Wisconsin during the Civil War (1916). The above 
paragraphs were written considerably before the appearance of Thorstein Veblen, Ab- 
sentee Ownership (1924), which contains an elaboration of their idea, with much em- 
broidery. , 

3 John B. Sanborn, “‘Congressional Grants of Land in Aid of Railways,” in University 
of Wisconsin, Bulletin, vol. v. . 


418 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


similar demands, the response was the same. The right of eminent 
domain which alone made it possible to build a railroad along a 
suitable right of way, could not run against the United States, and 
hence the Federal grant was an indispensable prerequisite. These 
grants of roadbed were generously conceived and went beyond the 
narrowest needs of the routes. The Illinois and Michigan Canal, 
in 1822, was allowed ninety feet clear on either side of the canal. 
The Tallahassee Railway, in Florida, which never got beyond the 
projector’s drawings, was allowed thirty feet clearance on either 
side in 1834. The West expected such treatment, and it would 
have been churlish or impolitic to refuse, and before the railroad 
demands became numerous the policy was well established. In 
1852 Congress reduced the matter to the form of a general statute: 
whenever a railroad should be chartered within the next ten years, 
and completed within the next fifteen from the date of the act, it 
was granted in advance a right of way of one hundred feet through 
the public domain, with the privilege as well of taking extra space 
as needed for its stations, and cutting timber whenever this could 
be found. : 

The act of 1852 settled the question of the right of way, but 
made it no easier for the company to finance the grades or find the 
rolling stock. The West wanted more than mere toleration and 
asked confidently for an endowment, and could point to the prece- 
dent of certain of the canals which had been so treated. In connec- 
tion with the Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois canals, Congress had 
aided the States to build by allowing them a number of sections 
along the line, so many on either side, alternately located like the 
red squares of a checker board. Well before the panic of 1837 the 
agents of western railroad projects were begging Congress for 
alternate-section land grants, on the double grounds that the roads 
could not be built without them and that the roads would so 
greatly raise the value of the remaining lands that Congress might 
endow treely and yet remain the gainer by the gift. In the next ten 
years the Senate frequently approved the idea, for in the Senate 
the equal representation of the States gave to the newer States a 
distended influence. But the House of Representatives long stood 
firmly against such an appropriation. In 1850 this opposition 
yielded, and the period of the land grants for railroads really 
opens. 

A central railroad for Illinois was the project over which the 
winning battle was fought. ‘The idea intrigued the prairie states- 


LAND GRANTS AND THE WESTERN ROADS 419 


men from an early date. Illinois was a long and slender chain of 
river settlements, from the lead mines in the Galena region to the 
marshes at the junction of the Ohio with the Mississippi. It had 
at the beginning no town of importance, and much of its shore line 
was so low as to be flooded with the freshets that came as regularly 
as the spring of the year. Inland a little, the vast prairies took 
shape, where “‘the soil, for the most part was of a rich, black, deep 
mould, of unsurpassed fertility, capable of producing in the great- 
est abundance wheat, rye, corn, oats, and fruits and vegetables of 
all kinds. But, with all their productiveness, the quarries and 
mineral wealth had remained comparatively unsettled and uncul- 
tivated... . These lands had been in the market subject to private 
entry for a third of a century at a mere nominal value, and yet in 
very few instances were purchasers found for them. Remote from 
markets, without facilities for transportation and with roads al- 
most impassable, the cost of handling the products of the lands to 
a market, and the time employed therein, amounted to almost as 
~ much as the value of the land.” * For fifteen years before Senator 
Douglas was successful in unloosing Federal aid to reclaim this 
Illinois Garden of Eden, his predecessors were working at the task. 

As early as 1836 the central road idea was recorded among the 
Illinois statutes in a special charter to a corporation that was to 
connect the southern end of the State with the Illinois River at the 
terminus of the Michigan canal. The canal itself was not yet built 
(nor was it completed for a dozen years), and the Sauk and Fox 
lands north of it were hardly freed of their native inhabitants, but 
the imagination of the youthful State was hard at work. The next 
year, the project was included in the long list of improvements 
that the State was proposing to construct itself; and money was 
voted, which, had it existed, would still have been far from ade- 
quate to the most limited conception of the road. It did not, how- 
ever, exist, it could not be improvised, and with the panic, the idea 
was indefinitely postponed. As a part of the State projection, 
however, steps were taken to create a southern terminus. 

The junction of the Ohio and Mississippi was an inviting stra- 
tegic point for commerce upon the map, but a reconnoissance of 
the country showed that for miles in every direction it lay below 
high water and that only through extensive drainage and levee 
construction could the tip of Illinois be made habitable. There 


4W.K. Akerman, Historical Sketch of the Illinois Central Railroad (1890); Howard G. 
Brownson, History of the Illinois Central Railroad to 1870 (1916). 


420 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


was no village there until in 1837 the State created Cairo by legis- 
lative fiat; and Cairo lived a precarious and moist existence for 
half a century. 

A third attempt at a railroad was made in 1843, but it, too, 
failed. Its promoters invited Congress to allow them to preémpt 
a share of the lands through which the road should run, but the 
time was not yet ripe. Settlement was indeed expanding, and 
Galena had become a bustling place at the northwest corner of the 
State. Chicago, too, was on the map; and from Chicago settlers 
were marching into the interior towards the Rock River. The 
strategic year that turned the central project toward success was 
1847, when the improvement convention at Chicago gave wide ad- 
vertisement to the northern prairies, and when Stephen A. Doug- 
las moved his home to that young city. 

Douglas was a Yankee immigrant, who had edged into Illinois 
politics in the preceding decade and who sat as a Representative in 
Congress from 1843 to 1847.5 He became a Senator in 1847 and 
was already entrenched as an agile and persuasive Democratic 
leader. The elderly giants with whom he sat were rounding out 
their generation without having succeeded in solving their critical 
problems of sectionalism. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Benton, 
whose voices had advised the Nation since the War of 1812, were 
still moving their combinations against each other without bring- 
ing order from chaos. Douglas brought a new note into the discus- 
sions and saw that to men of his generation belonged the future 
and untold success if only they could reconcile the conflicting cur- 
rents of interest. He approached the solution as a product of the 
frontier, unhampered by doubts as to constitutional powers, and 
captivated by the ideas of the railroad age. He became a leader in 
the railroad movement from the moment of his settling in Chicago 
and organized in Congress the votes needed to make the Nation a 
partner in the work. 

There were two main lines of thought that led to a land grant for 
the endowment of a railroad. One was the old idea of internal im- 
provements which was popular enough on the frontier, but was the 
particular dogma of the Whig party rather than the party to 
which Douglas belonged. Few southern Democratic votes could 
be procured through stressing this. The southern statesmen, how- 
ever, valued the territorial property of the United States, and 
John C. Calhoun saw no harm in using a part of the public domain 

® Allen Johnson, Stephen A. Douglas (1908), understands both Douglas and the West. 


LAND GRANTS AND THE WESTERN ROADS 421 


to improve the value of the rest. He rejected the idea as a step in 
internal improvements but was willing to support it as an invest- 
ment. And his vote was just as good on one theory as another. In 
the session of 1848 Douglas put through the Senate a land grant 
bill but failed to get it through the House. The next Congress saw 
the bill emerge triumphant in a different shape. 

Even such southern Democrats as were willing to invest public 
lands in railroads were lukewarm respecting a road more than 
three hundred and fifty miles long in the State of Illinois. And 
eastern Whigs, interested in the better development of communi- 
cation with the West, could see only a local project in an improve- 
ment that would merely parallel the Mississippi River and increase 
the commerce to the Gulf. In its old form the scheme called for a 
railroad between Galena and Cairo; Douglas added to it in 1848 a 
branch from a central point to Chicago, which gave it an interest 
to the East. The South found that the local project had blossomed 

into a national one in 1850, for a road from the Ohio River to 
- Mobile was provided also. As an early “‘Lakes to Gulf” enter- 
prise, it now conciliated all the votes that were to be influenced. 

In addition to a generous right of way the law provided that 
there should be granted to the States through which the road 
should run six sections of public land, alternately placed, for every 
mile of track. This would mean that the finished road would run 
through a twelve-mile strip, checkered with retained and granted 
sections. It provided also that the price of the reserved sections 
should be raised to a double minimum, of $2.50, so that the cash 
worth of what was retained should equal what the whole was 
worth before the grant. If any of the railroad sections should 
prove to be occupied by a preémptioner, or under other grant, the 
railroad was at liberty to select another section in exchange or 
indemnity for it, if it could find one, on the alternate principle, not 
more than fifteen miles from the track. The grant area thus ex- 
tended six miles on either side; the indemnity area nine miles 
farther in each direction. The grant was made not to the Illinois 
Central Railroad itself, or to the Mobile and Ohio, but to the 
States through which the line was to run, to be by them devoted 
to the railroad purpose. 

The bill of Senator Douglas Nene a law September 20, 1850, 
without attracting much attention outside the deliberative bodies 
that passed it. It constituted a large step towards the solution of 
the financial question which blocked the frontier railroads. It 


422 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


made the Nation a partner, and provided legislatures with an 
excuse for scandal, and promoters with a fund to waste; yet with- 
out it the West would have waited long for its railroads and its 
development. For the next twenty-one years there was never a 
moment when requests were not before Congress for additional 
gifts for roads that seemed as useful as the Illinois Central; and in 
nearly every session the requests were granted. The Middle West 
was covered soon with its mesh of railroads, the Illinois Central 
itself being completed by 1856. And the vision of Federal aid that 
had been realized for local purposes was harnessed to more grandi- 
ose schemes as Douglas and his friends developed the idea of sub- 
stituting for the overland trails a railroad to the Pacific Ocean. 


CHAPTER XLVI 
KANSAS-NEBRASKA AND THE INDIAN COUNTRY 


On the frontier of the forties the transition began that was to 
change the United States from its agrarian simplicity to urban and 
industrial complexity, that was to transform the method by which 
the settlement of the unoccupied wastes proceeded, and that was 
in another half century to drive the frontier off the map. The 
people of that frontier were Jacksonian, whether they thought of 
themselves as Democrat or Whig, and they were engaged in writ- 
ing into their State constitutions the truths of Jacksonian ex- 
perience, which they expected to last forever. Their farms were 
filling in the chinks over all the settled area and were pushing the 
new lines against the wilderness of the Upper Mississippi, the 
plains of Texas, and the valleys of the Pacific Coast. Behind the 
outlying farms, modern methods in the guise of railroads were 
catching up; and before the period was ended the railroad frontier, 
aided by national gifts, reached the Missouri River at its bend. 
Here it found that the main agricultural frontier, which spread 
over the State of Missouri in the twenties, had paused on the edge 
of the higher plains and the scantily watered region that early 
travelers had designated as the American Desert. The period of 
the forties, so far as economic development is concerned, begins 
with the revival of activity after the panic of 1837 and continues 
unabated until checked and terminated by the panic of 1857. 
The agricultural frontier, reaching the bend of the Missouri 
about the time that Monroe laid down his Indian policy, did not 
cross the Missouri or seriously encroach upon that policy for 
thirty years. In spite of the hundreds of thousands of emigrants 
who sought better conditions in Oregon or California, the western 
edge of farms remained substantially permanent, a little east of 
Independence. It could not have remained permanent if these 
migrants had seen anything that they coveted, for the United 
States never developed either law or opinion strong enough to 
balk a frontier that once set itself in motion. The country of the 
Indian Frontier was not a desert but it was less attractive than the 
well-watered farm lands of Indiana, Illinois, or Wisconsin. Its 
staple crop of grain was not marketable in the absence of roads or 


424 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


navigable rivers. Until the railroads reached it, it was possible to 
leave the Indians in undisputed possession. The trails ran through 
it, and the emigrants traveled along the trails, without desiring as 
yet to stop and acquire land. As late as 1853, the Commissioner 
of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny, reported that there was 
no serious encroachment of squatters upon the lands of his wards 
west of Iowa and Missouri. 

Before the acquisition of the Southwest, and the Compromise of 
1850, the Indian Frontier policy had been abandoned although 
not formally repudiated. With the development of heavy traffic 
along the trails the Government had stopped the further definite 
colonization of Indians. This was indeed substantially complete 
by 1841 and needed no further legislation or administration. The 
treaty arrangements with the Indians for the next decade were 
again fragmentary negotiations, as they had been before 1825. At 
the head of the Mississippi the Sioux, Sauk and Fox, and Winne- 
bago were under continuous pressure as the Iowa and Wisconsin 
pioneers worked out their destiny. In 1851 there were notable new 
Indian conferences, but they can scarcely be connected with any 
organized Indian policy. 

The great Sioux cession in Minnesota Territory is the outstand- 
ing negotiation with the Indians of the border in 1851.! As early 
as 1837 the Sioux of this region ceded to the United States all their 
lands east of the Mississippi, and Fort Snelling at the junction of 
the St. Peter’s and Mississippi was the only haunt of white men 
among them. When Iowa and Wisconsin in turn became States, 
there was turned adrift the northwest part of their territorial area. 
By this time some five thousand settlers had moved in, to resent 
being deprived of all the institutions of government. They were 
Wisconsin Territory until that became a State; then they were 
nothing. They, however, sent H. H. Sibley as a delegate to Con- 
gress, just as though they were still possessed of territorial status, 
and Congress allowed him to sit and paid his salary. In March, 
1849, his bill to create a Territory of Minnesota became a law. 
But Minnesota being almost entirely within unceded Sioux lands 
had no room for a swelling population, save in the angle between 
the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers, that had once belonged to 
the Northwest Territory.? 


1The Minnesota Historical Collections have gathered many reminiscent articles on the 
Indian problem. W. W. Folwell, Minnesota (1908). ; 
3 N. West, Henry Hastings Sibley (1889); Wilson P. Shortridge, The Transition of a Typical 


KANSAS-NEBRASKA AND THE INDIAN COUNTRY 425 


In 1851 Governor Alexander Ramsey conducted treaty councils 
with the Sioux, in which they agreed to cede all their claims to 
territory east of the Red River of the North and the Big Sioux 
River (constituting now the western boundary of Minnesota) ex- 
cepting a strip twenty miles wide along the Upper Minnesota 
River. The compensation promised to the tribes was considerable, 
but its payment was diverted because at the moment of signing 
the cessions the tribes were persuaded to sign an agreement that 
claims of the traders against individual Indians should be satisfied 
out of the fund before the proceeds should be divided. The traders 
saw to it that their claims were greater than the whole purchase 
price; with the result that the tribes had the mortification of seeing 
their lands disappear without an equivalent in any form that they 
could understand. To make matters worse, the encroaching set- 
tlers moved upon the lands as soon as the treaty was signed and 
before the Senate had ratified or Congress appropriated the pur- 
chase price. “I used all my efforts to prevent this state of things 
and to induce the white population not to occupy the land until it 
could be done lawfully,” declared the local Indian agent. “I called 
on the military at Fort Snelling to assist in removing improper 
persons; but they refused to act. The current of emigration be- 
came irresistible, and the country is virtually in the possession of 
the white population.” By 1860 there were 172,023 residents in 
this new territory. 

The treatment of the Minnesota Indians was tragically unfair, 
as the agricultural frontier swept over them and left a train of 
grievances to drench the Minnesota farms with blood before they 
were forgotten. Further west on the open plains the other tribes 
of Sioux, and their relatives, were brought into negotiations in the 
same summer, and only less unfairly dealt with. 

The Upper Platte Agency at Fort Laramie was an important 
strategic point as soon as the columns of emigrants began to 
march up the Platte Valley, en route to the Sweetwater and 
South Pass. There was rarely any serious disturbance, but the 
emigrants were continually complaining of the thieving and beg- 
gary of the plains Indians, while they themselves were violating 
the Intercourse Act and selling whiskey to the natives. In 1849 
the Secretary of the Interior, as one of his earliest official acts, for 
his office was new that year, recommended that funds be provided 


Frontier with Illustrations from the Life of Henry Hastings Sibley (1922); Marcus L. Hansen, 
Old Fort Snelling, 1819-1858 (1918). 


426 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


for a great council with these tribes along the trails. In the follow- 
ing year the funds were available, and the agent at Fort Laramie 
began the difficult task of rounding up his wards.’ 

As the Indians were scattered on the plains from Canada to 
the Arkansas River and could never be easily diverted from their 
hunts or hurried to a meeting place, there were months of prepara- 
tion necessary before the tribes began to drift in during the 
summer of 1851. They came from all directions, Sioux mostly, but 
also bands of Assiniboin, Arikara, Grosventres, Crows, Cheyenne, 
and Arapahoe. The councils were held under the direction of 
Thomas Fitzpatrick, the local agent, and at their close the as- 
sembled braves recognized the right of the United States Govern- 
ment to build roads and posts at pleasure, agreed not to commit 
depredations upon emigrants, and accepted the council presents 
as well as the promise of an annuity of $50,000, for fifty years. 
The Sioux agreed that their proper range lay north of the Platte 
Trail; the Arapahoe and Cheyenne similarly accepted as theirs the 
country between the Platte and the Arkansas. The United States 
Senate, in its wisdom, amended this treaty to read fifteen instead 
of fifty years, but otherwise treated it as though it were in force. 
It was not possible to send it back to the tribes for resubmission, 
and it never really had the force of law. Yet in spite of the cancel- 
lation by the Senate of seventy per cent of the compensation 
promised in the agreement, the tribes, in general, kept the peace. 

The lack of deliberate evil intent, which pervaded the Indian 
affairs of the forties, disappeared shortly after the negotiation of 
the Fort Laramie Treaty and in the next few years they appear to 
have been directed by persons who knew only too well what they 
wanted. In the summer of 1854 the first land office in the Indian 
Country was opened across the border from Missouri, to retail to 
settlers the tribal lands that had been dedicated to perpetual 
Indian use. The double forces of slavery propaganda and railroad 
extension had met, to bring about the repeal of the Missouri Com- 
promise, and to force the unwilling frontier of the farmers to en- 
croach upon the old Indian frontier. The Civil War period had 
begun and was for the moment marching hand in hand with the 
forces that were*to make secession an impossibility. 


3 James C. Maline, “Indian Policy and Western Expansion,” is an excellent study in 
University of Kansas Bulletins, 1921; Lucy E. Textor, ‘Official Relations between the 
United States and the Sioux Indians,” in Leland Stanford Jr., University Publications, 
1896,_ 


KANSAS-NEBRASKA AND THE INDIAN COUNTRY 427 


The suggestion that a railroad might some day be constructed 
to the Pacific was made as soon as the American imagination began 
to play upon the idea of any railroad. And as soon as the earliest 
pioneers had crossed South Pass, this route began to impress itself 
as the desirable one. By a process of elimination, no other route 
could be of practical importance until after 1846, for until then 
Spain controlled the Pacific Coast north to 42°, and the British 
half of Oregon silenced discussion of any line north of Puget Sound. 
The only way to get to the Pacific was through Oregon and down 
the valley of the Columbia. The early missionaries called atten- 
tion to the moderate grades that prevailed along the whole Oregon 
Trail, and editors gave space from time to time to letters whose 
writers figured out the costs of such a road and descanted upon 
the advantages. So long as these believed that it could be built 
for ten thousand dollars a mile, the practical value of their sug- 
gestions was less than the sentimental. 

But every year after the panic of 1837 railroads became more of 
a reality, the Pacific settlements were of greater consequence, and 
the obstructions in the way of a road became a matter of keener 
regret. These obstructions were of two sorts. The physical ob- 
struction was some two thousand miles of unoccupied plains and 
mountains; the political was the policy of Government which con- 
secrated forever to Indian use a compact barrier of land bounded 
on the east by the Indian frontier line, and on the west by the 
territories that faced the Pacific. By 1850, the engineers were 
aware that it was entirely possible to build a road, if it could be 
financed. In the same year the Indian Country received a definite 
western boundary along the lines of the new territories of Oregon, 
Utah, New Mexico, and Texas. Within this Indian Country the 
treaty obligations of the United States were such that the Indians 
could not be dispossessed without national stultification; and 
until dispossessed, the country could never be settled by whites, 
and support a railroad. 

By 1850 reasonable men supposed that a Pacific railroad would 
some day be constructed. They owed much of their enlightenment 
to the general influences of the railroad era and much to the specific 
propaganda of the first great devotee of Pacific railroads, Asa 
Whitney, of New York. 

Asa Whitney was a merchant in the Chinese trade. For over 
half a century American ships had been circling the Horn, with 
furs for China, to bring back silks, tea, and the objects of art that 


428 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


still fill the cupboards and cabinets of seafaring families. Whitney 
visited China and beheld with his own eyes the inexhaustible 
market for American goods. He returned to devote his life to the 
promotion that should make this traffic a possession of the United 
States. A railroad to the mouth of the Columbia River would cut 
many months from the dreary ocean voyage and would pass the 
wealth of the Orient through the port of New York. “‘There is the 
East; there is India!’’ exclaimed Benton when he had been edu- 
cated to the point of believing in the continental railroad. Whit- 
ney, long before him in the field, presented to Congress a specific 
petition for a railroad charter in 1845. 

The Whitney memorial, bearing the date of January 28, 1845, 
is embedded in the public documents of the second session of the 
Twenty-eighth Congress. It describes the trade in rhetorical 
fashion and suggests that the obvious line for the railroad is one 
beginning at a suitable point on the Great Lakes. It asks of Con- 
gress a charter and a land grant. Five years before Senator Doug- 
las and his allies put the Illinois Central bill through Congress, 
Whitney was begging for a strip of the public domain sixty miles 
wide, along the route of his projection. He explained in detail that 
he would build the road with the cheap European laborers who were 
thronging in through New York from Ireland and Germany; that 
he would pay these as little as possible in cash and as much as 
possible in land; that each construction gang, when paid off, would 
settle along the route as a nucleus for the future population; and 
that in their trade there would be found a profitable traffic for the 
railroad from the opening of its first section. 

Whitney was immediately recognized by Niles’ Weekly Register 
as “‘prince of all projectors,’ but he was born too soon. Although 
he easily convinced his hearers that his scheme was practicable, 
he could not live down the suspicion of being a visionary himself. 
He made a survey west from Milwaukee in the summer of 1845 
and ran a publicity service whose results can be seen in papers als 
over the United States. He went, in succeeding years, on speaking 
trips, visited State legislatures, addressed them in their assembly 
chambers and invariably passed out a sheaf of blank petitions 
which his interested auditors used to bombard the members of 
Congress. “‘This enterprising gentleman...has perhaps more 
than any man in the country illustrated the importance of a con- 
nection with the Pacific,” said DeBow’s Review in 1849. 

At the moment when the acceptance of Whitney’s idea became 


KANSAS-NEBRASKA AND THE INDIAN COUNTRY 429 


so general that his scheme was regarded as reasonable, other events 
removed the simplicity that attended it until 1846. In that year 
the United States acquired the undisputed ownership of a part of 
Oregon and entered upon the war which made California a pos- 
session of the country. There had been but one road to Oregon; 
but now that California was American, the Santa Fé Trail and the 
various routes through Texas to San Diego and San Francisco 
became practical. There developed among the Mississippi valley 
localities a rivalry to possess the profits of a continental railroad, 
and in the nation at large a jealousy of sections, lest the other 
section should reap the profit. 

The frontier of the forties, excited by the future profits to be 
earned by the local railroads that grew apace, and absorbed in the 
local selfishness that was the touchstone of success, presented a 
western front in which several localities might contest with reason 
for the terminal of the Pacific railroad. The city of New Orleans, 
which already thought of itself as the metropolis of the interior, 
believed that the best route would run due west through Texas 
and New Mexico to the Colorado River at Yuma, and thence to 
Southern California. Vicksburg had its devotees, and there, as 
well as at Memphis, was insistence upon a line that should thread 
the cotton plains of Texas, to El Paso and Yuma. Cairo, to which 
the new Central Railroad was expected to bring the business of 
Illinois, had a vision of western trade, as had St. Louis which 
already monopolized the fur trade and the western outfitting 
business. The youthful city of Chicago, which in imagination saw 
the bonds that were to connect it with the Atlantic, saw the Platte 
trail inviting a railroad to the Pacific; a future which Milwaukee 
was disposed to contest, for Milwaukee had similar ambitions of 
its own. And before Whitney’s voice was silenced by his retire- 
ment, the tip of Lake Superior, where Duluth now is, had its sup- 
porters as the farthest west of the Great Lakes. 

The log-rolling of the localities, after 1846, forbade the au- 
thorization of a railroad, and even if there had been no other 
difficulties than the mere selection of a route there must have been 
a long deadlock. The larger sectionalism was the reflection of the 
slavery controversy that placed the slaveholding States in a com- 
pact group, ambitious for itself and even more jealous of anything 
that might enhance the opportunities of the rival section. The 
agitation of Whitney and his followers proceeded after 1845, and 
the more it convinced, the more it aroused emotions to block its 


430 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


fulfillment. In 1853, after the voice of California had entered the 
debate, the most that Congress could do was to authorize a series 
of surveys of possible routes to the Pacific. 


MINNESOTA 


TERRITORY 


ORGANIZATION OF THE WEST 


1850-1854 
Frontier Line of 1850 000009°9°%% 





“Tf any route is reported to this body as the best,” said Gwin, 
the new Senator from California, “‘those that may be rejected will 
always go against the one selected.”’ His pessimism was warranted 
for southern Senators were openly admitting the existence of a 
Pacific railroad majority and hoping that enemies of the road 
might accomplish its defeat by stirring up dissensions among its 
friends. It was possible, however, to place in the Army Appropria- 
tion Bill of 1853 a sum of $150,000 to be spent by the Secretary of 
War for the maintenance of survey parties in the field.t The 
Secretary to spend the money was Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, 


‘ The results of these surveys are conveniently digested with excellent bibliographies, in 
George L. Albright, Official Explorations for Pacific Railroads (1922). 


KANSAS-NEBRASKA AND THE INDIAN COUNTRY 431 


whose political connections were already crystallized and whose 
mind was not likely to be convinced in favor of any route that 
would serve the North. 

But the friends of a railroad knew that there were other things 
than prejudice and politics to impede the construction of a line 
along the Platte trail. The Indian Country was a continuous 
menace to their interests. It could be said with truth that a south- 
ern line would cross the mountains more easily and be less blocked 
by snow in winter than a northern route. It could also be said, and 
this carried much real weight, that Congress had already brought 
into existence a continuous zone of organized States and territories, 
Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and California, through which the 
railroad would run. Every mile of the route would be available 
for colonization, with no limitations except the fertility of the soil 
and the nature of the terrain. In December, 1853, this was re- 
inforced by the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico of the Gila Valley, 
through which was known to run a specially appropriate right of 
way for such a road. 

But any northern route was barricaded by the Indian Country 
which now stood as a monument to the short sight of those who in 
1825-1841 built it up as a perpetual western boundary to the 
States. There were none now who thanked God for the American 
Desert and the Indian tribes that prevented straggling of the 
people across the continent. Instead a demand arose that the 
Indian Frontier be abolished, that the tribes of the border be made 
to cede their lands again and that a right of way for the agricul- 
tural frontier be acquired west of the Bend of the Missouri. The 
Commissioner of Indian Affairs was directed in 1853 to undertake 
the negotiations and remove the tribes. 

With such treaties in mind, Manypenny, the Commissioner, 
visited the Indian frontier in the summer of 1853 and found the 
tribes in residence there, just as they had been colonized twenty 
years or more before.’ He had no stomach for the job, for the 
wording of the colonization treaties and their even more solemn 
implication forbade the creation of any organized territory within 
treaty limits; and the tribes had shown no desire to abandon their 
guarantees. They were not even under pressure of population, 


5 The Annual Reports of the United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs afford a run- 
ning picture and comment on Indian matters. They include not only the operations of the 
Commissioner for the period, but have detailed reports from the several agencies. Many- 
penny subsequently wrote Our Indian Wards (1880). 


432 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


which had in the past given a justification to many of the re- 
movals, and Manypenny found almost no squatters or prospectors 
among the tribes. It was a political demand that he was serving, 
to remove the obstacle to railroad building and to create terri- 
tories to placate the southern Democrats. The front of the tribes 
that were now to be disturbed began at the north with the Omaha, 
in the angle between the Missouri and the Platte. South of these, 
the more important Indian nations were the Oto and Missouri, 
the Sauk and Fox, the Kickapoo, and the Delaware who were in 
the angle north of the Kansas River, with an outlet to the game 
range of the western plains. The Shawnee were south of the 
Kansas; and below them the Kaskaskia and Peoria, the Pianke- 
shaw and Wea, and the Miami. Yet further south there was a 
reserve that was ascribed to the New York Indians, which these 
had never been willing to occupy. 

Without enthusiasm, most of the tribes of the border signed the 
treaties that were offered them in 1853 and accepted compensation 
and territory elsewhere. But about half the nations refused to 
yield completely to the pressure and adhered to reduced reserves 
within the limits of their possessions. Of these the Delawares were 
the most important, since the Delawares reserve touched the 
Missouri border at Independence and was a direct impediment to 
settlement of the Kansas River Valley, or the region around Fort 
Leavenworth. Where tribes were stubborn, Manypenny accepted 
partial cessions and made an agreement that the ceded lands 
should be administered by the United States in trust for the ceding 
nations; that the acres should be sold at public sale to the highest 
bidder and that they should not be offered at the usual minimum 
price of $1.25 until after the lapse of three years. In July, 1854, 
Congress opened a land office in what was to be Kansas, for the 
sale of the Indian lands thus acquired. But it made no serious 
effort to keep preémptors off the trust lands, which the contracts 
required to be sold at auction. Grave scandals grew out of this 
neglect, but the tribes were too weak to make an effective resist-_ 
ance. “‘By alternate persuasion and force,” wrote Manypenny in 
his annual report after the negotiation was completed, “‘some of 
these tribes have been removed, step by step, from mountain to 
valley, and from river to plain, until they have been pushed half- 
way across the continent. They can go no further: on the ground 
they now occupy the crisis must be met, and their future deter- 
mined.” 


KANSAS-NEBRASKA AND THE INDIAN COUNTRY 433 


The statesmen who framed the Compromise of 1850 believed 
that it was necessary to save the Union and that without it the 
plantation States would try the remedy of secession. If this should 
occur, it was believed by many that the States of the Mississippi 
Valley would of necessity follow the South because of the dominat- 
ing influence of the Father of Waters as a trade route. Canals had 
been given up as an economic panacea, and the significance of the 
through railroads was not appreciated by even the most enthusi- 
astic promoters of the railroad movement. 

Lhe Compromise saved the day, and secession was averted 
until it was too late for it to succeed. But the elder statesmen 
agreed that another such struggle would wreck the Union, and 
pledged themselves, after the passage of the measures in the 
autumn of 1850, not to revive the question of slavery, but to treat 
it as a settled issue. In his inaugural address the next President, 
Franklin Pierce, in 1853, gave his unhesitating support to the 
measures of 1850 and expressed the fervent “hope that the ques- 
tion is at rest.”’ He spoke, however, to a new political audience, 
for Webster, Clay; and Calhoun were dead, and Benton had been 
repudiated by his State. Pierce had behind him a victorious 
Democratic party, entrenched in both houses of Congress, but it 
was marshalled by new generals, Jefferson Davis, William H. 
Marcy, and Stephen A. Douglas. Two of these were in the cabi- 
net; the third was party leader in the Senate. 

The only unorganized part of the United States after the Com- 
promise of 1850 was the Indian Country, running from Texas to 
Canada, and from the Missouri border to the Rockies. So long as 
it endured, it constituted a barrier which the most hopeful railroad 
projector could hardly expect to pass, and its significance was 
fully appreciated by southern leaders who pointed to their own 
open strip as the obvious route. In the Congress that expired in 
1853 the signs indicated that the barrier would not be allowed to 
stand, in spite of treaties and southern support. The railroad 
surveys were ordered, the Indian cessions were demanded, and a 
bill to create a Territory of Nebraska covering most of the Indian 
Country passed the Senate. In the debates over this, opposition 
was based upon the good faith which was pledged against it, and 
the bill failed of enactment. It reappeared in the first session of 
the new Democratic Administration, accompanied by a report 
from Douglas of Llinois, the chairman of the Senate Committee 
on Territories. 


434 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


The motive of Senator Douglas in pushing through Congress 
in 1854 a bill for the territorial organization of the Indian Country 
has been one of the great moot points in the interpretation of 
American history. To his surprise and dismay, his measure broke 
the charmed silence, and let loose all the attack upon slavery that 
the old leaders had hoped to stifle. Mr. James Ford Rhodes, whose 
monumental volumes are still, with right, the guide of the student 
through this period, felt able to assert with confidence, “‘that the 
action of the Illinois Senator was a bid for Southern support in the 
next Democratic convention.” And most historians have agreed 
with Mr. Rhodes. But of recent years Professor Frank H. Hodder, 
whose diligent research in the history of the West has been done 
from the angle of a professor in Kansas, has collected much testi- 
mony to indicate that Douglas was primarily a railroad statesman. 
He shows with great plausibility and what approaches proof, that 
Douglas’s leadership was wrapped up in the economic advantage 
of his adopted State and of his home town, Chicago. The South 
was averse to further northern territories from which slavery could 
be excluded and averse also to aiding any northern railroad to the 
Far West. To get support for a railroad measure out of a Congress 
in which the Democrats were so strongly entrenched it was neces- 
sary to pay a price. And this Douglas unquestionably paid.° 

As he first brought in his bill in January, 1854, it still provided 
for a single territory of Nebraska, but he had discovered that in 
spite of the Missouri Compromise it was not necessary to exclude 
slavery from it. The principle of the Compromise of 1850, he said 
in substance, was the right of each territorial community to de- 
termine for itself the character of its local institutions. California 
had come in free because it so desired; Utah and New Mexico had 
been organized without requirement upon slavery. There were 
many, moreover, he advised; who doubted whether Congress ever 
had the right to exclude slavery from any of the territory of the 
United States. Accordingly, in the spirit of 1850, he urged the 
creation of Nebraska Territory without a word on slavery. 

Within the next few days his ideas grew. Kansas was cut apart 
from Nebraska, and embraced that part of the former huge 
territory that fell between the thirty-seventh and fortieth paral- 
lels. This was obviously to give a chance for each of the sections 


$ Frank H. Hodder, ‘‘ Genesis of the Kansas-Nebraska Act,’’ in Wisconsin State Historical 
Society Proceedings, 1912; but compare P, O. Ray, The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise 
(1909). 


KANSAS-NEBRASKA AND THE INDIAN COUNTRY 435 


to gain a State. An amendment was also added to the bill that 
said in explicit words what Douglas’s original measure had said by 
inference. It declared that the Missouri Compromise was repealed, 
that there might be no misunderstanding on the subject. 

From January until the end of May the battle raged, with the 
South finding its price and supporting with growing enthusiasm 
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. But in the North, instead 
of gratification that now a means was being found to build a cen- 
tral railroad, a new political party was born to fight the extension 
of slavery; and even northern Democrats joined in the denuncia- 
tion of Douglas and his bill. The disturbance was out of all pro- 
portion to the expectation; what seems to have been conceived as 
a piece of log-rolling in order to let the railroads cross the plains 
became a fight of vital consequence. Its leader did not weaken 
from the storm he had provoked. Instead he found and developed 
further reasons to justify his attitude on the Missouri Compromise 
and convinced his friends that popular sovereignty was a new and 
great interpretation of the frontier ideal of democracy. He was 
doubtless not blind to the fact that if he could succeed in getting 
slavery transferred to the realm of popular sovereignty and out of 
national politics, there would be an excellent chance for him to 
lead a united Democratic Party where he would.’ 

The new Territories of Kansas and Nebraska were created May 
30, 1854, and together embraced the whole Indian Country except 
the part between Texas and the thirty-seventh parallel, which is 
to-day the State of Oklahoma. A land office was opened, and the 
sections acquired from the Indians by Manypenny’s treaties were 
thrown open to the preémptioner. But the passions of the debate 
prevented the territories from being settled in the normal fashion 
that had recently been witnessed in Jowa and Texas. There was 
no drift to Kansas or Nebraska until politicians started one by 
propaganda. North and South the cry was heard against per- 
mitting either section to colonize and thus determine the future of 
the territories. Northern philanthropists gave of their wealth to 
aid societies to assist able-bodied men to go to Kansas, to make it 
free. Southern politicians urged the sons of the South to keep it 
slave. The response to these heated calls came mostly from the 
north, for persons wealthy enough to have slaves generally took 


7 From “consent of the governed,’’ through “popular sovereignty,”’ to “‘self-determina- 
tion,’ there has been a marked similarity of teaching among Democratic statesmen. 


Andrew C. McLaughlin, Lewis Cass (1891). 


436 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


little part in frontier advance. The southerners contented them- 
selves with riding across the border, en masse from Missouri, to 
vote a southern ticket on election days. Kansas became “‘bleeding 
Kansas” in a few months as partisans of the sections clashed, but 
the bloodshed was lessened because of the scant number of set- 
tlers who came in.® 

Pierce, and after him Buchanan, did what Presidents could do 
to make a slave State out of Kansas. They favored the slave 
minorities that called themselves the people and disapproved the 
action of the free settlers, who were the majority. Four governors 
of the territory were appointed in as many years, in the vain 
search for a man who could manage Kansas. The factions on the 
ground made four constitutions in the same period, but were 
properly balked in their aspirations for immediate statehood, for 
when the decade came to an end there were only 107,206 people in 
Kansas; and in Nebraska but 28,841. As a means of settling the 
slavery question the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was even less than a 
total failure. It was hardly more important as a means of promot- 
ing emigration. But it was a success in removing the barricade of 
the Indian Country and preparing the way for a railroad to the 
Pacific. 3 

6 W. E. Miller, Peopling of Kansas (1906). 


CHAPTER XLVII 
“PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST!” 


TuE panic of 1857, like its predecessor twenty years before, sepa- 
rated two waves of migration. Two sharply contrasting types of 
effort met at this point; and two geographic areas whose common 
boundary is the line of the Bend of the Missouri, assumed modern 
form in the successive periods. There was to be in the new era, 
and in the western region of the plains, little of the gradual growth 
that was distinctive of the advance of the agricultural frontier 
from the line of the Proclamation of 1763 to that of the Missouri 
Bend. This had been a continuous process, without haste and 
without cessation, until it brought Missouri into the Union in 
1821. Then its pressure to the west had stopped for a period of 
thirty years. Rounding out its conquests north and south, it re- 
mained a Mississippi Valley movement. The advance after the 
panic of 1857 was thus not from a new frontier into a newer, but 
from and through a community in Missouri and Iowa whose 
institutions had lost much of the rawness of frontier beginnings 
and were taking on an aspect of settled prosperity. The country 
from Lake Michigan to the Missouri was indeed yet chiefly agri- 
cultural, but it was becoming mixed with the complex contacts of 
the railroad age and the first stages of industrial society. Cincin- 
nati and New Orleans, the centers of wealth in the West at the 
beginning of the century, were now great cities; but their domi- 
nance over the Mississippi Valley was being contested by St. Louis 
and Chicago, the newer growths of the steamboat and railroad 
ages. 

The town of St. Louis was rounding its first century of settle- 
ment in the fifties.! In this hundred years it had seen the rise and 
decline of the Missouri fur trade, the advent of the flatboat mi- 
gration and the arrival of the river steamers. It had found the 
reason for its existence in the supply trade of the farming country 
around it, and in wholesale business which it could command from 
its strategic position near the head of river commerce. Benton, in 
his oratorical moments, spoke of fifty thousand miles of navigable 


1L. U. Reavis, St. Louis: The Future Great City of the West (1875), possessed an ironical 
title even at the date of its publication. 


438 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


inland waters in the Mississippi system and tributary to St. Louis, 
and he had been reluctant to envisage any other type of commerce. 
Half of Benton’s mileage was imaginary, so far as it was available 
for anything bigger than a flatboat in flood time, yet there was 
enough to insure the rise of an important city at the mouth of the 
Missouri River. 

At the time of the admission of Missouri, St. Louis was a town 
of some 5000 inhabitants, and twenty years later it boasted 16,469. 
The Jacksonian migration was abroad by this later date, and in the 
next two decades the city grew tenfold, to 160,773 in 1860. This 
was, in 1860, a considerable body of citizens, more numerous than 
the whole population of Delaware, nearly as large as that of the 
whole State of Minnesota, and half as large again as the Territory 
of Kansas possessed in the same year. These two decades were 
those of the fullest development of the steamboat traffic, and the 
sloping levees at St. Louis were ever crowded with the bustle that 
accompanied it.2 Separated by the river from contact with the 
eastern railroad net (a contact not made until the opening of the 
Eads bridge in 1874), St. Louis looked to the West for its railroad 
conquests. On July 4, 1851, it broke ground for the first of its 
State-aided group of radiating lines.* The State was sponsor, ex- 
changing bonds for mortgages on the railroad properties. But it 
was fifteen years before the main line west from St. Louis, which 
it grandiloquently called the Pacific Railroad of Missouri, com- 
pleted its track parallel to the Missouri River, through Jefferson 
City to Kansas City. Six years earlier than this the Hannibal and 
St. Joseph Railroad had made the crossing of the State to the 
Missouri River above the bend; but this had been accomplished 
not under the stimulus of Missouri, but at the prompting of the 
northern rival of St. Louis, the city of Chicago on the lakes. 

The upstart town, as Chicago appeared to St. Louis eyes, 
showed signs of rapid growth at about the time of the memorable 
river and harbor convention of 1847. It may have had sixteen 
thousand inhabitants then, living on the marshy tract south of the 
mouth of the Chicago River and struggling against the continuous 
attacks of wind, dust, and mud. The antiquarians could recall a 
few families and a Government fort dating from the first years of 


2? Mark Twain, Life of the Mississippi (1883), is the classic description of this environ- 
ment, in which Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were born to live forever. 

§ Robert E. Riegel, “'Trans-Mississippi Railroads during the Fifties,’ in Mississippi 
Valley Historical Review, vol. x; ‘The Missouri Pacific Railroad,” in Missouri Historical 
Review, vol. xvii. 


PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST! 439 


the century; and at the evacuation of this fort in the War of 1812 
there had occurred one of the worst disasters of that conflict. For 
twenty years more Fort Dearborn and its environs remained far 
in advance of agricultural settlement, and no steamboat is known 
to have made a landing there until in 1832 one of them acted as 
army transport, bringing General Winfield Scott and his eastern 
troops to the relief of the border threatened by Black Hawk. 
Hastened by the emergency they had made the trip from the 
Chesapeake, by way of the Erie Canal, in eighteen days to Chi- 
cago. On Scott’s recommendation, cordially reinforced by the 
local interests, Congress undertook the construction of a harbor 
there, and the Illinois and Michigan canal commissioners had 
already platted a town site at the northern end of the canal. 

In the next fifteen years the beginnings of Chicago occurred, 
and there developed a rivalry with the other lake towns, St. 
Joseph, Michigan City, Southport, Racine, and Milwaukee, out 
of which Chicago emerged, triumphant. Its great special ad- 
vantages were its access to the prairies of northern Illinois, and 
the congestion of trails, as overland settlers from the East rounded 
the tip of Lake Michigan, before spreading out west and north- 
west. The convention of 1847 developed local self-confidence, the 
first local railroad started towards Galena in 1848, and four years 
later the two railroads from Michigan made their entry. Chicago 
became the center of an intricate railroad net in the fifties, while 
St. Louis was still projecting ways and means. The opening in 
1857 of the long line from St. Louis to Cincinnati, thence to 
Marietta and Baltimore, parallel to the Ohio River, did not alter 
the fact that Chicago was the railroad center and that the domi- 
nance of St. Louis was grounded upon the river traffic. There were 
29,963 Chicagoans in 1850, and 109,260 in 1860. Ten years more, 
and the last census in which St. Louis led, showed St. Louis 
310,864; Chicago 298,977. In 1880 Chicago was more than 
150,000 ahead of its rival. 

The prosperity of the fifties was great everywhere in the United 
States. In the South it was King Cotton that made the fortunes, 
in the North the rise of manufactures, in the West the transforma- 
tion of agricultural frontier into complex commonwealths. Every- 
where railroad mileage was one of the best indices of excitement 
and prosperity; and of the thirty thousand miles of 1860, nearly 
nine tenths were laid down between the Mexican War and the 
financial crisis of 1857. If one looks at the productive industries 


440 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


from which the wealth for this investment was acquired, one sees 
chiefly the agricultural, for mineral exploitation was in its infancy, 
and the rising manufactures were still generally too small to supply 
American consumption. At the beginning of the period little of 
the capital was found abroad, for the European investor was wary 
of Americans after his experience with the default and repudiation 
that followed the panic of 1837. But as years advanced and the 
era of prosperity became better founded, foreign capital was 
available to supplement the savings of the older States. 

The agencies for spending were further developed than those for 
accumulating. The banking system of the United States went 
from bad to worse after the expiration of the Second Bank of the 
United States. The balance of trade drained coin out of the 
country to pay foreign creditors, and there was no important 
American source of precious metals until after 1848. The Whig 
Party, where it could, supported banks; but there was no official 
machinery for their oversight. The fifteen hundred institutions 
that carried on the business of the country at the end of the fifties, 
were uncontrolled and speculative and possessed of most of the 
dangerous elements that marked the banks of the period after the 
War of 1812. The better bankers, with a half century’s experience, 
knew more about banking, but they were in constant fight with 
the wild cats and the inflationists who flourished under the bank- 
ing rule of laissez faire. Currency was still unreliable and inade- 
quate, and credit machinery was unevenly distributed, while the 
amount of credit at hand was progressively affected by the se- 
quence of years of extra heavy investment. 

The time came, as come it must, when the capital available was 
less than the aggregate demands of the country, and some one 
must perforce do without. The railroads, the farm developments, 
the roads and bridges, and the plants of the growing cities, as well 
as the factories where the artisans worked and the new houses in 
which they lived, progressively tied up the accumulated capital, 
much of which yielded no income, or none as yet. The period of 
prosperity lasted longer than it otherwise would have done, be- 
cause in the middle of the fifties the American grain found a strong 
market abroad created through the closing of the Russian wheat 
fields in the Crimea. While the Crimean War lasted, the pro- 
sperity of tue United States was secure. The prosperity of the 
South was sure even after the peace, because cotton was just find- 
ing its unlimited market, and the sewing machine was increasing 


PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST! 441 


the consumption of cotton faster than the planters could harvest 
and gin it. In the winter of 1856-1857, with the war over, the 
business of Europe began to return to its normal channels, and the 
market for the American surplus broke. The railroads that were 
still in search of lenders, found that they could not place their 
stocks and bonds to any advantage, and a general stringency 
served notice that the moment was approaching for a cessation of 
activities and a liquidation of debt. 

There need not necessarily have been a destructive panic, al- 
though it is hard to see how much suffering could have been 
avoided, with the construction enterprises stopping because they 
had no money for pay-roll use or for purchase of material. But the 
failure of a great financial institution, the Ohio Life Insurance and 
Trust Company on August 24, 1857, was the spark that set free the 
explosive forces of financial.apprehension. A writer in Hunt’s 
Merchants’ Magazine pointed out that the new electric telegraph 
acted as an intensifier for the crisis, for it flashed the bad news 
instantaneously to every section of the country, and the depres- 
sion instead of working out in waves from the center of disturbance 
to the circumference of the frontier, struck everywhere at once. 
Banks failed, one hundred and fifty, perhaps. Notes that had 
been used as currency lost their value. Persons with assets tried 
to realize upon them all at once, and the markets for securities 
broke. This was the first panic in the experience of the new stock 
exchanges, and they were caught unready and at a loss. In the 
autumn of 1857 the Middle States, the East, and the Northwest 
were financially prostrate, and unemployed persons congregated 
in the towns, while broken farmers thought of abandoning their 
places and seeking better fortune elsewhere. In the Mississippi 
Valley, whose whole social aspect had been changed in twenty 
years since the last great panic, men were torn loose from their 
moorings during 1857 and 1858, and set to looking for a new means 
of easy wealth. 

Just about Christmas, 1858, the news reached Omaha that gold 
had been found among the foothills of the eastern slope of the 
Rockies, in what rumor described as the Pike’s Peak Country. 
This was enough to set the drifting population on the march, and 
the mineral empire budded with mining camps in the next few 
months. It would have attracted a large migration, even in time 
of general prosperity as California did in 1849, but it now was 
visited by a body of seekers inflated by the depression of the East. 


442 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


The antecedents of the Pike’s Peak discovery run back to the 
excitement of 1849. The forty-niners by tens of thousands were 
summoned across the continent by the lure of gold which few of 
them were to find. Some lost their courage and turned back en 
route; and some came home disillusioned by the reality of El 
Dorado. Others remained in California to live and farm, and 
found a reason for existence which had not been before them when 
they started. A few found gold, and fewer still retained it. And an 
indefinite, but large number, remained forever seekers. These last 
acquired the habit of the roving life; with a pick and pan, a burro 
and a few camp tools they spent their lives prospecting the moun- 
tain valleys. They pushed far down into Mexico and South 
America and far up to Alaska and the Yukon; they appeared in the 
gold fields of Australasia and Africa; and the casual camp fire in 
any mining region thereafter was likely to stir up a flood of remi- 
niscence that covered the mineral regions of the world. Many 
of them are known to have continued their search on the American 
Continental Divide throughout the fifties, and there were frequent 
unfounded rumors of discoveries that stirred the pulse of the am- 
bitious everywhere. } 

In the summer of 1858 two or three hundred such prospectors 
were at work along the mountain wall directly west of Kansas 
Territory, in a region that had escaped development.‘ From the 
Bend of the Missouri, the Oregon Trail pushed off northwestward, 
and the Santa Fé Trail southwestward; and between the trails, 
with their backs against the foothills lived the Arapahoe and Chey- 
enne Indians. The emigrant trains had passed them for a quarter 
of a century, without much molesting them, so complete was the 
immunity of the so-called American Desert from the activities of 
settlers. Even Kansas and Nebraska Territories, now four years 
old, and each located at the mouth of a great river draining the 
Indian Country, had not brought much change to the range 
Indians in their western ends. Kansas-Nebraska was politics 
rather than settlement in its inception, and politics it still re- 
mained. A prosperous agricultural border would not have had 
numbers of men free to be prospecting during the farming months 
of 1858; yet there were men from Lawrence and Lecompton who 


‘¥F. L. Paxson, “The Territory of Colorado,’’ in American Historical Review, vol. x11; 
Jerome C. Smiley, History of Denver. With Outlines of the earlier History of the Rocky Moun- 
tain Country (1901), is unusually accurate and well illustrated. Clyde L. King, History of 
the Government of Denver (1911). 


PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST! 443 


were out in force. The precise date of their discovery of gold near 
Pike’s Peak is not recorded. Sometime that autumn they found it 
in the sand banks at the mouth of Cherry Creek, one of the afflu- 
ents of the South Fork of the Platte River, twenty-odd miles south 
of the fortieth parallel, and hence in Kansas Territory. Pike’s 
Peak was ninety miles away, but it was the one spot in the vicinity 
that the border knew by name. 

Before winter set in, Denver City was in existence, drawing its 
name from the then governor of Kansas. Quills of gold dust had 
been sent down the Platte trail to Omaha, and the handful of 
prospectors had decided that among themselves they contained 
the raw materials for a new territory or even State. Following a 
conference in one of their cabins, men were found willing to go to 
Washington to ask a territorial government and to Lecompton to 
ask the creation of counties by the legislature of Kansas. Con- 
gress, deadlocked by the slavery fight, was incompetent to do any- 
thing, but Kansas responded by authorizing the organization of 
- five new counties, west of the 104th meridian.’ This was less than 
the autonomy that the Denver settlement desired, and in practice 
there was no government except what the miners made for them- 
selves. 

The news of gold rioted along the border settlements as that 
from Sutter’s Fort had done a decade earlier. The western papers 
took up the story, and soon were printing itineraries to the Bend 
of the Missouri, and thence to Denver. It was no grueling trip 
like that to Oregon or San Francisco, but an easy seven hundred 
miles from the Missouri River. Few prospectors went out in the 
winter of 1858-1859, but in the spring of 1859 their camps lined the 
Missouri from Independence to Council Bluffs; and early in April 
their march across the plains began. They used the heavy wagons 
of the prairie schooner type, and also the light carriages of the 
border. They went on horseback with pack animals, and some 
who lacked worldly means took their cue from the Mormon emi- 
gration and pushed their baggage before them in light two-wheeled 
hand carts. This had been a much-used means by the Mormons 
for bringing in their poorer converts, and it was successful in the 
hands of Pike’s Peak gold seekers. “Pike’s Peak or Bust!” was a 
common slogan, printed in the papers, and painted on the canvas 


5 There are complete sets of county maps in Helen G. Gill, “The Establishment of 
Counties in Kansas,”’ in Kansas Historical Society Collections, vol. v1; and F. L. Paxson, 
“The County Boundaries of Colorado,”’ in University of Colorado Studies, vol. 11. 


444 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


of their wagons. Before the season was over, more than one wagon 
was stranded along the trails, with the frank confession painted on 
the wagon flap, ““Busted, By Gosh!” Passing, meeting, overtaking’ 
the emigrant trains, were to be found also the coaches of a regular 
passenger service, the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Stage and 
Express Company that made better time than the prospectors and 
that carried into Denver City in June no less a personage than 
Horace Greeley, on a journalistic trip of observation. One of his 
colleagues had been printing there The Rocky Mountain News 
since April 23. 

William Tecumseh Sherman was at Fort Leavenworth in April, 
1859, and wrote for the information of his brother, John: “‘At this 
moment we are in the midst of a rush to Pike’s Peak. Steamboats 
arrive in twos and threes each day, loaded with people for the new 
gold region. The streets are full of people buying flour, bacon, and 
groceries, with wagons and outfits, and all around the town are 
little camps preparing to go west....Strange to say, even yet, 
although probably twenty-five thousand people have actually 
gone, we are without authentic advices of gold. Accounts are 
generally favorable as to words and descriptions, but no positive 
physical evidence comes in the shape of gold, and I will be in- 
credulous until I know some considerable quantity comes in in the 
way of trade.” 

The earlier residents of Denver, and the mining camps along the 
foothills, north and south, anticipated the throng of gold seekers; 
and those who owned mining claims that promised well were fear- 
ful of a rush that might wash them away and dislocate their min- 
ing titles. As in California, they had formed mining districts im- 
mediately on the discovery. They took further steps during the 
winter to prepare a government. There were named camps at 
Golden, Boulder, Black Hawk, Central City, Idaho Springs, and 
Georgetown, and delegates from these met in Denver in April to 
consider statehood. This gathering issued a call for a more regular 
convention, which met in June, after the advance guard of the 
fifty-niners had begun to countermarch. The first Pike’s Peak 
gold was placer dust, easily washed from the creek bottoms in 
many places, but not abundant enough to make many miners rich. 
The quartz lodes, when found upstream, were so refractory that 
they could not be mined or smelted without great outlays of labor 
and capital, which the average miners could not command. Gold 
production was mining company business, and as soon as the eager 


PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST! 445 


crowds saw this, most of them started back to the States. By June 
so many were homeward bound that it took a stout heart to be- 
lieve that there would be any one left by fall. The June convention 
adjourned until August to see. In August it was somewhat en- 
couraged, and framed for the consideration of the voters a State 
constitution and a memorial to Congress asking territorial status. 
The latter prevailed at the polls, and a delegate was sent to Wash- 
ington at once. “‘Here we go,” wrote Byers in his Rocky Mountain 
News, “‘a regular tripple-headed government machine; south of 
40 deg. we hang on to the skirts of Kansas; north of 40 deg. to 
those of Nebraska; straddling the line, we have just elected a 
Delegate to the United States Congress from the ‘Territory of 
Jefferson,’ and ere long, we will have in full blast a provisional 
government of Rocky Mountain growth and manufacture.” 

The Territory of Jefferson became a reality when a new conven- 
tion, in October, framed a territorial government to last until 
Congress should respond to the request for legislation. The area 
claimed covered eight degrees of longitude, from 102 to 110; and 
six degrees of latitude, beginning at the 37th parallel. R. W. Steele, 
who was elected governor, met his first legislature on Novem- 
ber 7, 1859. 

There was no action by Congress upon the application for a new 
territory in either the session of 1858 or that of 1859. The slavery 
deadlock was complete, and the same forces of sectionalism that 
prevented Pacific railroad legislation prevented the creation of 
new territories whose political complexion might be in doubt. 
The existing territories that were ready for statehood were not ex- 
cluded from the Union, but Congress would go no further. 

Minnesota and Oregon were the new States that finished their 
probationary period just after the panic of 1857. The former 
made its constitution in the panic year, in a fashion that was novel 
then and has remained unique. Its convention was bicameral, and 
the basic law was framed in agreement by two houses.* But the 
double organization was not intended by the legislature that called 
it. It grew instead out of the fierce slavery fight in the election, 
and a split among the delegates into two bodies each claiming to 
be the constitutional convention. The rival bodies sat side by 
side, and drafted two constitutions, which were so much alike that 
it was possible to procure an agreement on the document upon 


6 William Anderson, “‘ A History of the Constitution of Minnesota, with the first Verified 
Text,” in University of Minnesota Research Publications, 1921. 


446 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


which the people were invited to vote. The State government that 
was elected was Democratic, with H. H. Sibley as first governor. 
Congress, perhaps because of this, admitted Minnesota May 11, 
1858. 

The Oregon convention met at Salem in 1857, without an en- 
abling act, after the people had demanded admission since 1850. 
The generous boundaries of 1848 had been reduced by Congress in 
1853, when Washington Territory was formed north of the Colum- 
bia River. The territory was still further reduced for statehood 
purposes, its eastern part being added temporarily to Washington. 
It too was Democratic, and so received the votes in Congress that 
were needful for admission, February 14, 1859. 

The population of the Territory of Jefferson was drawn from 
States and territories where the Republican movement was strong, 
and where the Democratic Party did not expect to find a voting 
rnajority. The appeals of Jefferson fell therefore upon deaf ears, 
but although legislation could be postponed, the fact could not be 
concealed that a new principle had entered into the problem of 
territorial creation with the discovery of Pike’s Peak gold. This 
was the utilization of the mineral empire. | 

The territorial maps for the period of the fifties show that the 
Rocky Mountains were regarded only as a barrier, inconvenient 
for purposes of emigration and railroad building but convenient 
for purposes of boundary making. Oregon, Utah, and later Wash- 
ington, were given the Rocky Mountains as eastern limits while 
for Kansas and Nebraska they formed a western line. The thought 
that in the mountain area there might be any resource that would 
compel the creation of mountain States was unborn until the 
prospectors found gold on Cherry Creek. Discoveries came thick 
and fast after this, and before Governor Steele had been two years 
in office no one could believe that one territory would meet the 
need. Even that one was deferred until secession occurred in the 
winter of 1860-1861 and the southern Democratic votes went 
home. 

The census enumerators found 34,277 persons in Colorado in 
1860; too few for a State, but sufficient to continue the demand for 
local and autonomous government. On February 28, 1861, Presi- 
dent Buchanan signed a law cutting away from Kansas and 
Nebraska, on the east, and Utah and New Mexico on the west, the 
new Territory of Colorado. The name Jefferson was discarded, 
and the boundaries to which the miners aspired were reduced. 


PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST! 447 


Colorado extended between the thirty-seventh and forty-first 
parallels, and between the twenty-fifth and thirty-second merid- 
ians west of Washington. Denver became the capital city. At the 
same time, the, Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians, upon whose do- 
main, under the agreement of 1851, the miners were an intrusion, 
were persuaded to recognize the inevitable and make a cession of 
the land along the foothills. This was done at Fort Wise, on the 
Upper Arkansas, where a trader named Bent had long maintained 
a post in the early days of the Santa Fé traffic. Here the tribes, 
among whose leaders Black Kettle was the best known, ac- 
cepted a new reserve on the north bank of the Arkansas River, 
in the angle west of Sand Creek, and ceded to the United States 
the hunting range lying between the Platte and Arkansas rivers. 
The Arapahoe and Cheyenne retained the right to live and hunt in 
the ceded country as long as it continued unsold, but they ceased 
to have the rights of wild Indians of the open plains. 

It remained for President Lincoln to organize the territory 
whose organic act Buchanan signed. Lincoln appointed as gov- 
ernor a former army officer named William Gilpin, a visionary 
and near-poet of Pennsylvania Quaker stock, who wrote prophetic 
books on the future of the Rocky Mountain country.’ Gilpin ar- 
rived in Denver at the outbreak of Civil War hostilities, and found 
himself adrift on a disturbed frontier, with the Government too 
much preoccupied at the moment to listen to his cries. Colorado 
for the next few years lived a precarious life, amid Confederate 
plots and Indian uprisings. Its mineral development never again 
induced a population as large as that of the boom year of the fifty- 
niners. Its inhabitants took slowly to agriculture and were two 
decades in finding a permanent basis for existence. With their 
advance the frontier march beyond the Missouri begins and a new 
period of national development opens. 


7 William Gilpin, The Central Gold Region (1860); The Mission of the North American 
People (1873). 


CHAPTER XLVIII 
THE FRONTIER OF THE MINERAL EMPIRE 


For ten years after the discovery of gold in the Pike’s Peak coun- 
try, the map of the Rocky Mountain area was in a condition of 
continual revision, as Congress, on half knowledge or worse, tried 
to keep the institutions of government abreast with the activities 
of the gold seekers. The task was great and involved because gold 
was everywhere; it was elusive because the gold was generally in 
small amounts; and great communities, gathered hurriedly by a 
new find, dispersed as quickly when the limits of the deposit were 
ascertained. 

The new Colorado Territory was the first step in the procedure 
of breaking up the mountain wastes into orderly governments to 
meet the needs of the shifting population. It was accompanied by 
other steps, however, which had been deferred like Colorado be- 
cause of the deadlock over the slavery question, and which were 
released in the closing days of Buchanan’s administration, after 
the southern obstructionists had gone home. These were the ad- 
mission of Kansas, the organization of a new territory, Dakota, 
for the farmers of the upper Missouri country, and the creation of 
an overflow mining territory east of the California line, for the 
Washoe gold and silver seekers. 

Kansas, 1n spite of the war that had raged over its plains, was 
not much of a State even in 1861. Most of its settlers lived in its 
extreme eastern counties, near the rivers that were its sole connec- 
tion with the Union. Two hundred miles west of Missouri was 
still the open range, and the village at the old Council Grove, 
where the caravans had been in the habit of completing their pro- 
tective organization, was on the actual frontier even yet. The 
Jayhawkers and the Blue Lodges, and Old John Brown at Osawa- 
tomie, had kept up the turmoil; but there had not been a rush of 
incomers on any terms.! The fourth State constitution, made at 
Wyandotte in 1859, and ratified by what people there were that 
autumn, waited for acceptance by Congress for more than a year. 


1 Oswald G. Villard, John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After (1910), is one of the most 
exhaustive books of its kind. But historians are not in complete agreement on John Brown; 
a local] interpreter is Hill P. Wilson, John Brown, Soldier of Fortune: A Critique (1913). 


THE FRONTIER OF THE MINERAL EMPIRE 449 


The southern vote would not play true to itself, and admit that 
Kansas was entitled to be a free State if it so desired, yet it had, in 
1854, welcomed Douglas’s discovery that the people had a right to 
determine their institutions for themselves and that popular sover- 
elgnty was superior to the Missouri Compromise. When Kansas 
was at last admitted in 1861, Congress cut off its western portion, 
at the 25th meridian, in order to make room for Colorado Terri- 
tory whose creation was only a matter of a few weeks. 

Dakota Territory was formed under an act of March 2, 1861, 
and included all of Nebraska Territory lying north of the 43d 
parallel. In addition, it embraced a fragment of domain that had 
been without government since 1858, and whose people provided 
the motive force for the whole transaction. The admission of 
States and the creation of territories was never an exact process, 
and more than once Congress, without intending it, did destruc- 
tion as well as construction by its laws. Thus in 1848 the admis- 
sion of Wisconsin, with a western boundary at the St. Croix River, 
turned adrift a settled part of the territory between that stream 
and the Mississippi. This became a part of Minnesota in 1849. 
Similarly the admission of Minnesota in 1858, with a western 
boundary near Sioux Falls on the Big Sioux River threw away the 
angle between the Big Sioux and the Missouri, into which settlers 
had entered by way of the Missouri Valley. This large triangular 
tract, west of Minnesota as it now is, and extending to the Mis- 
sour River, was added to the northern slice taken from Nebraska, 
to form Dakota. At the lower end of this triangular area, was a 
village of Yankton, near the mouth of the James River, and for a 
hundred miles or so along the Missouri near Yankton there was an 
occasional farmer. Not until 1868, however, did Joseph Ward 
bring here his bride and undertake to found a parish and a college 
for the Congregational Church.? Several hundred miles north of 
Yankton, at Pembina on the Red River of the North, were a few 
more residents who had come there with the Canadian settlement, 
and who maintained a precarious connection with the world by 
means of an annual ox-cart caravan to Fort Snelling. The creation 
of Dakota was only incidentally concerned with the content of the 
Rocky Mountain empire, and belonged to the western margin of 
the agricultural frontier. Like Kansas and Nebraska, Dakota was 
not under heavy pressure of settlement. 

Nevada Territory, born the same day as Dakota, was rather a 

2 George H. Durand, Joseph Ward of Dakota (1913). 


450 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


supplement to California than a following of the new principle of 
subdivision of the mountain area, although in fact it accomplished 
such a division. In the same summer of 1858 in which prospectors 
found gold on Cherry Creek, there were other wanderers at work 
on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, near Lake Tahoe and 
the arbitrary eastern boundary of California. On the eastern 
slopes of Mount Davidson they found silver rather than gold, al- 
though there was much gold with it, and the new camp was “‘on 
the public highway to California,” where tens of thousands of 
emigrants had passed, without seeing the wealth beneath their 
feet. The mining district took its name at first from Lake Washoe, 
at the foot of Mount Davidson, and it drew its people mostly from 
the California towns, although some came “from Kansas and 
Nebraska, from Pike’s Peak and Salt Lake.” 3 

This was in the extreme western end of Utah Territory and had 
had thus far no interest except as the route of the California trail, 
along the Humboldt Valley. The Mormon colony on Great Salt 
Lake kept its hand on the highway, principally through the main- 
tenance of service stations for emigrants. Carson County, Utah, 
was founded on the trail in 1854; Carson City, near Washoe Lake, 
sprang into life in 1858. Not until the spring of 1859, when the 
famous deposits known as the Comstock Lode were found, did the 
Washoe mines arouse much interest, and then they were outshone 
in the public eye by those of Pike’s Peak. But that autumn, as at 
Denver, the Carson City miners made themselves a constitution 
and organized a spontaneous State, which they pretended was 
superior to the government of Utah Territory. 

The eastern boundary of Nevada Territory was placed in 1861 
at the 39th meridian west of Washington, and California was in- 
vited to assent to a western boundary along the watershed of 
the Sierra Nevada. When California failed to do this, which 
meant a reduction of territory for her, Nevada was given an addi- 
tional degree along the eastern side, making the 38th meridian the 
boundary. In 1864 there was a further extension to the 37th me- 
ridian, and an addition to the south which carried Nevada beyond 
the 37th parallel to the Colorado River. At Carson City a terri- 
torial government was set up, whose most important member, 
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was the private secretary of the ter- 


*H. H. Bancroft, History of Nevada, Colorado and Wyoming (1890); Albert Bigelow 
Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), has rare interest and gives a vivid picture of this 
place and period. 


THE FRONTIER OF THE MINERAL EMPIRE 451 


ritorial secretary. The overland journey of “Mark Twain,”’ with 
his brother Orion Clemens, to this new post in the summer of 1861, 
has become a classic jaunt, immortalized in Roughing It (1872). 
The mining camp which occasioned their trip would have justified 
itself, if it had done no more than bring to this new type of frontier 
its greatest artist. 

A few thousands of the fifty-niners stayed in Colorado to help 
set up a State; some fewer thousands remained in Nevada for the 
same purpose. But many times their number ranged over the 
mountains between, and north and south, under the unsettlement 
that the Civil War brought into many minds and subject to the 
hypnotic influence of the search for gold. There were drifters, who 
kept on drifting, war or no war. There were deserters from Union 
armies and from the Confederacy. There were sympathizers with 
both causes who left home because of unpopularity, and there was 
an admixture of that class that “left their country for their coun- 
try’s good.”’ Once in a while, spurts of loyalty, or the reverse, set a 
_ mining camp aflame. There were personal conflicts that revealed 
how many men were sensitive enough to fight, if not loyal enough 
to stay at home to do it. Before the war was over the succession of 
camps that followed the discoveries into every corner of the moun- 
tains provided reason for as thorough a subdivision of the moun- 
tain West as Congress need ever undertake. 

In the summer of 1860 gold was found in the Clearwater Valley, 
one of the eastern tributaries of the Snake River. The new field 
was somewhat northeast of the main Oregon Trail, which cut 
across the great bend of the Snake, towards Walla Walla; but it 
was not so far that miners from Oregon and Washington Territory 
could not flock there in the spring of 1861. Five thousand, or 
more, were on hand by mid-summer and brought Lewiston to life, 
in the angle between the Clearwater and the Snake, and in the 
heart of the reserve of the Nez Percé Indians. As the news spread, 
they kept on coming. “‘The Idaho miners,” said H. H. Bancroft, 
‘were like quicksilver. A mass of them dropped in any locality, 
broke up into individual globules, and ran off after any atom of 
gold in their vicinity. They stayed nowhere longer than the gold 
attracted them.” In quick succession they spread to the Salmon 
River, another eastern tributary of the Snake, and to the Boise. 
They pushed south of the Snake to the Owyhee, and at every sta- 
tion they found more gold and planted temporary camps. By 1862 
Congress was under pressure to create a territory for them, for the 


452 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


seat of Washington was too far west and that of Dakota too far 
east. 

Before Congress acted on the problem of the Snake River min- 
ers, there was a like problem of Missouri River miners. The Co- 
lumbia and Snake, and their eastern tributaries, interlock upon the 
northern continental watershed with the headwaters of the Mis- 
sourl, and the Bitter Root Valley, although it drains into the 
Pacific, is as easily accessible from the east as from the west. It 
was through this country that Lewis and Clark went in 1806; and 
in 1853 Isaac I. Stevens at the head of the northern survey for the 
Pacific railroad.t Stevens was deeply impressed with the fertility 
of the valleys and the ease of crossing the divide, and his reports to 
the War Department are full of the confident rhetoric of the con- 
vert. No great trail had crossed the continent here, however, be- 
cause of the lack of a population around Lake Superior to feed it, 
and because of the ease of access to the main Platte trail. 

For a generation before gold was found in the Bitter Root and 
the Beaverhead, the Missouri had been put to occasional use. In 
1832 the fur traders’ steamer reached Fort Union at the mouth of 
the Yellowstone.’ Later, as spring freshets encouraged greater 
penetration, the boats worked their way farther up the shallow 
stream, until in 1859 they made a new head of navigation near the 
great falls of the Missouri, at Fort Benton. Nearly every year 
thereafter, until the railroad came, the boats reached Fort Benton, 
with annuity goods for the northwest Indians, supplies for the 
trappers and fur traders, and with emigrants who became more 
numerous after the suspicion of easy gold got abroad. West of 
Fort Benton, to Walla Walla, was the obvious route for a cut-off, 
to shorten the overland journey. Congress authorized in 1855 a 
road from the Falls of the Missouri to Fort Walla Walla, and John 
Mullan was placed in charge of its construction. It was passable 
by 1860, but few emigrants used it because of the rarity and un- 
certainty of the river connection at Fort Benton. It none the less 
attracted attention when the miners sought the upper affluents of 
the Missouri and Columbia. 

Missoula County, Washington Territory, was organized in 1862 
for the benefit of miners in the Bitter Root, and Boise County a 
few months later for the prospectors on the Boise branch of the 

4 Hazard Stevens, The Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens by his Son (1900). 


5 Hiram M. Chittenden, History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River. 
Life and Adventures of Joseph La Barge (1903). 


THE FRONTIER OF THE MINERAL EMPIRE 453 


Snake River. The rush to Bannack City and Virginia City, east of 
the Continental Divide, drew miners away from Boise City. Vir- 
ginia City claimed fifteen thousand inhabitants at its maximum; 
but in its turn it contributed to the headlong rush to Last Chance 
Gulch, one hundred and thirty-eight miles north, on the road to 
Fort Benton, where Helena appeared in 1864. 

The waters of Bill Williams Fork of the Colorado River yielded 
up their gold and attracted miners to the southwest fields. The 
exploitation of this region, which lay off the traveled roads, was a 
by-product of the Civil War, and the march of California volun- 
teers. Colonel James H. Carleton’s California column, some 
eighteen hundred strong, marched across the California desert, 
and up the Gila River Valley, to the relief of the Union forces in 
New Mexico in 1862. There was little fighting for them, but they 
were compensated by the opening of the placer deposits of the 
Colorado Valley — “one of the richest gold countries in the 
world,’ Carleton declared the next spring in a letter to Halleck. 
- But the conditions that made for easy prospecting made it hard to 
keep an army in the ranks, and Carleton complained constantly of 
the frequent desertions of his men who could not withstand the 
lure of the gold fields. He even suggested that a mining regiment 
might be the solution, meaning one whose soldiers should be 
practical prospectors and compensated in part by leave to spend a 
share of their time among the hills. The new field created an inter- 
est in a part of New Mexico Territory where none had been before 
and diverted attention from the Rio Grande, as well as from the 
ancient villages of the Santa Cruz Valley, near Tucson. 

It was no new thing to find precious metals in New Mexico. 
The Spanish missionaries had discovered silver deposits which had 
already been worked by the Indians, along the old Sonora Trail to 
the head of the Gulf of California. Nogales, Arizona, is where the 
Santa Cruz crosses the Mexican boundary to-day. At Tucson, a 
little north of this, the stream reaches the valley through which the 
Southern Pacific Railroad has found its way. Still further north, 
the Santa Cruz would make a junction with the Gila River if it 
were not swallowed up in the arid sands of Arizona on the way. 
Tucson was the village of the Spanish miners; and after the Mexi- 
can War and the Gadsden purchase, American prospectors visited 
the country seeking to reopen the silver mines. A former officer 
of the regular army, named Mowry,® with southern associates, 

6 Silvester Mowry, Arizona and Sonora (3d ed., 1864). 


454 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


revived the diggings, and started a movement as early as 1856 
for the division of the Territory of New Mexico. They even had 
a constitutional convention at Tucson in 1860, without arousing 
Congress to action in their behalf. They disappeared before the 
advancing column of Carleton, for their sympathies were with the 
Confederacy. 

The placer gold of the Colorado River and the Bill Williams 
Fork drew miners to the western end of New Mexico. Carleton 
reported in 1863 that “‘2t will be absolutely necessary to post troops 
in that section of the country; indeed the capital of Arizona will be 
sure to be established there. All of the people of Tucson, our team- 
sters and employés generally, who could possibly get away, have 
already left for that region.” There were about twenty-five thou- 
sand Indians in the western end of New Mexico, and under seven 
thousand whites, at the time of the gold discoveries. It was a fair 
inference from the experience of the other mining camps that 
these numbers would speedily be increased. 

The miners were more diligent than Congress in developing the 
mineral empire, but every success of theirs reacted upon Washing- 
ton. After the passage of the Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota acts, 
Congress became involved in the maze of war legislation and was 
never able to give systematic consideration to the demands for 
additional subdivisions of the Rocky Mountain country. It was 
sympathetic enough, but not well informed as to the prospects of 
permanence for any community, and its legislation was founded 
chiefly upon temporary expediency. With this there was mingled 
a willingness on the part of the war party to encourage the creation 
of new States or territories that might be expected to be loyal to 
the United States. 

No new territory was created in 1862, but in 1863 Arizona and 
Idaho were added to the list. The former was detached from New 
Mexico, February 24, 1863, and included that portion of the older 
territory lying west of the 32d degree of longitude west of Wash- 
ington. In its original form, its northern line on the 37th parallel 
continued west to the California boundary, thus including in Ari- 
zona a triangle northwest of the chasm of the Colorado and en- 
tirely detached. Part of this tract was separated and added to 
Nevada in 1866. The first territorial capital was where Carleton 
had advised, at Fort Whipple, which became the town of Prescott. 
In a later period the capital was often shifted, coming to rest pre- 
sently at Phoenix on the Gila River. 


THE FRONTIER OF THE MINERAL EMPIRE 455 


Idaho was created a week after Arizona, at the expense of the 
adjacent territories of Washington, Utah, Dakota, and Nebraska. 
It included a huge rectangle north of Colorado and Utah, between 
the 27th meridian from Washington and the eastern boundary of 
Oregon, thus reducing the Dakotas and Washington to their pre- 
sent dimensions. There was, however, no effective economic or 
political unity created in Idaho. The ridge separating the miners 
of the Missouri from those of the Snake was a barrier to unity, in 
spite of the geographic nearness of the two systems of camps. Be- 
fore the territory could be organized with the seat of government 
at Lewiston (which the territorial governor, W. H. Wallace, se- 
lected because it was close to his home in Washington), there was a 
demand for partition, and the separation of Montana. “To at- 
tempt to restrain miners would be, to my mind, like attempting to 
restrain the whirlwind,” wrote the Indian agent at Lewiston, who 
knew. Congress speedily responded to the facts of the shifting 
prospectors. 

In May, 1864, autonomy was provided for the camps at Ban- 
nack, Virginia City, Deer Lodge, Pioneer, and Missoula, with the 
Bitter Root Range as their western limit, and an extension down 
the valleys to the Dakota line.’ Montana thus acquired its present 
boundary at the start and held its first legislative assembly at 
Bannack the following winter. Idaho territory was cut down to 
greatly reduced dimensions, and the southwest rectangle of its do- 
main, corresponding roughly to Wyoming, was attached to Da- 
kota for governmental purposes. { 

After 1864, the political map of the United States was on the 
verge of completion, with only the division of the Dakotas and the 
establishment of Wyoming Territory left undone. The former was 
postponed until the time was ripe for their admission as States. 
The latter came in 1868. It would doubtless have come earlier had 
important mining camps arisen within the limits of the present 
State. The few mines caused no boom, and the transit through the 
area along the familiar Oregon Trail was the only important fact 
that lessened the Indians’ possession of this hunting range of the 
eastern slopes. When Wyoming Territory was freed from Dakota 
and set up for itself in July, 1868, the causes were the completion 
of the Union Pacific Railroad across its breadth and the establish- 
ment of the town of Cheyenne at the junction where a southern 
line branched off to Denver. 

3 The Montana Historical Society Coniributions are full of pioneer reminiscences, 


456 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Between the discoveries of 1858, and the Wyoming Act ten 
years later, the subdivision of the mineral empire was completed. 
The map told a new story, and the new conditions brought into 
American politics by the influence of the dispersed settlements of 
the miners, were affecting the courses both of economic develop- 
ment and political balance. 

The war Government at Washington made what use it could of 
the changing Far West. Lincoln was a practical statesman, and 
foresaw the situation that might result when after victory the 
votes of the South might be added to those of the northern Demo- 
crats who had hampered the prosecution of the war. Its conse- 
quence might well be the delivery of the United States into the 
hands of those who had risked their lives to wreck it, and those 
who had countenanced, or, at most, mildly opposed the experi- 
ment. To offset this, he searched the plains for new communities 
that might be susceptible of development into States with Union 
sentiments. Before the decade of mining excitement was over, Ne- 
vada, Nebraska, and Colorado, not to mention the western portion 
of Virginia, were brought within the range of statehood politics. 

The admission of West Virginia was a war measure, defensible. 
if at all, only on the ground that a state of civil war justifies the 
acceptance of frauds that are useful in their consequences. It was 
well known before Virginia seceded that her western counties were 
opposed to the course, and the Virginia ordinance of secession was 
carried by tide-water votes. The counties in the piedmont and 
mountains were divided in their desires; those of the West were 
antagonistic. It was accordingly possible for Union sympathizers 
in the Wheeling district to start a movement for the division of the 
State and the creation of a loyal West Virginia. The domineering 
politics of eastern Virginia had nearly provoked such revolt many 
times before the war; secession brought it to a head. 

But under the Constitution of the United States, no State 
boundary may be changed without the consent of the State con- 
cerned; and Virginia was in active revolt against the United 
States. A revolutionary Virginia government was therefore organ- 
ized in the western counties, within Union lines; and this under the 
protection and at the wish of the war Government, gave the con- 
sent required. Congress accepted it as though it were real, and in 
1863 permitted the Senators and Representatives of West Virginia 
to take their seats. 

With the Government in such need and Congress in such 8 


THE FRONTIER OF THE MINERAL EMPIRE 457 


mood, it was not surprising that in the session following the crea- 
tion of West Virginia, bills should pass to enable the three ripest 
territories to frame constitutions and enter the Union. Nevada 
and Colorado were enabled on the same day, March 21, 1864; 
Nebraska a month later, April 19, 1864. 

The proceedings in Colorado came to naught. A convention in 
Denver made a constitution in July, which the voters promptly 
rejected. The reason for rejection appears to have been the heavy 
taxation that might be expected to follow admission, incident to 
the setting up of a State establishment. A second convention, 
irregularly assembled the following summer, made a constitution 
which the people accepted; but by this time Lincoln was dead and 
Andrew Johnson was in no mood to be a party to the increase of 
the radical Republican vote. Johnson found reasons to decline to 
issue the proclamation of admission for Colorado, and Senator 
Sumner in the ensuing debates opposed action because, whereas it 
required a population of one hundred and twenty-seven thousand 
_ to be entitled to one Representative under the apportionment act, 
Colorado had a total not exceeding twenty-five thousand. Con- 
gress nevertheless passed a bill to admit the territory, which John- 
son vetoed May 15, 1866. The bill was passed again the next ses- 
sion and again vetoed. In spite of the fact that by 1867 the radical 
Republicans were repeatedly passing reconstruction measures over 
the veto of the President, it was impossible to procure the votes for 
Colorado. It remained outside for ten years more. 

Nevada made better headway than Colorado. There was on 
hand at the date of the enabling act a constitution made in 1863, 
which was touched up for presentation in 1864. The arid wastes of 
the territory, and the scanty population were overlooked by a 
Government that needed votes. Since time was pressing, with the 
presidential campaign of 1864 approaching, the enabling act pro- 
vided that upon the completion of a suitable constitution the 
President should admit the new State by executive proclamation. 
Strict constitutionalists raised a mild question whether this was 
not an evasion by Congress of its own duty to perform the act of 
admission, but the scheme prevailed, and on October 31, a few 
days before the critical election, Lincoln proclaimed Nevada as a 
State. To William M. Stewart, its first Senator, he is reported to 
have said, “I am glad to see you here. We need as many loyal 
States as we can get.’ 


8 William M. Stewart, Reminiscences (1910), is so inaccurate that too much credence 
ought not to be placed on any of its statements. 


458 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER | 


In Nebraska the procedure for admission limped, but was finally 
effective. There had been little settlement in the ten years since 
the creation of the territory, and this was confined to a string of 
villages along the Missouri, below the Platte. Omaha was but a 
name. Fort Kearney (the settlers refused to spell correctly the 
name of the soldier, Kearny) was beyond the region of settle- 
ment.? The convention chosen under the enabling act of 1864 
never met, for at the same election the people had been asked 
whether they desired to form a State, and like Colorado they voted 
no. In the legislature of 1866, however, a constitution framed by a 
group of Omaha lawyers was brought in as a bill, passed and sub- 
mitted to referendum by the people. It passed by a scant majority 
of one hundred, in a total vote of under eight thousand; and was 
accepted by Congress as sufficient. Johnson vetoed the bill for 
the admission of Nebraska the day after he vetoed Colorado 
for the second time, but the measure was just enough better than 
the Colorado bill to receive the votes needful for passage over 
the veto. Nebraska became a State March 1, 1867. 

The exploration of the mineral empire and the creation of the 
mountain territories were natural consequences of the extension of 
the frontier of the miners beyond that of the farmers. The farming 
frontier was still content to remain at the Bend of the Missouri 
while the miners were organizing the thousand miles beyond. The 
admission of the plains States was politics rather than frontier 
development. But the new processes started after the panic of 
1857 could have only one outcome in the end — the disappearance 
of all the open frontier and the creation of a final group of States. 


? Albert Watkins, “‘History of Fort Kearny,” in Nebraska State Historical Society 
Collections, vol. xv1; J. Sterling Morton and Albert Watkins, Illustrated History of Nebraska 
(1905-1913). 


CHAPTER XLIX 
THE OVERLAND ROUTE 


THE gossip of the miners as they gathered around the camp-fires 
or sought shelter in their flimsy shacks, is not usually to be rated as 
sound historical source, nor did it often become the starting point 
for great movements either in politics or business. But one of their 
persistent rumors, told in his cups by many a prospector, con- 
nected their vital need with the Government of which they saw so 
little. The legend begins with a wakeful miner, on a moonlight 
night, in camp anywhere south of the California Trail. The hero 
rolls over in his blanket, looks across the desert, and there in the 
distance sees what causes him to rub his sleepy eyes and look again. 
It is usually a huge white camel, less often black, and sometimes 
followed by a herd of lesser camels who clearly recognize him as 
their lord. The story is generally told by one who has no confi- 
dence of being believed, and who Is entirely unaware that on June 
18, 1856, a train of camels did march into San Antonio. 

Edward Fitzgerald Beale ! was in command of this camel corps, 
the first and last in American experience, and had himself urged 
the action which had resulted in an appropriation by Congress, an 
expedition to the Levant to procure them, a voyage home to 
Indianola, Texas, under Lieutenant David D. Porter, and the 
launching of the experiment of acclimating the ship of the Arabian 
desert upon the arid wastes of the American Southwest. For the 
next two years the camel corps was tried out under all the condi- 
tions of travel over the desert. “They are the most docile, patient, 
and easily managed creatures in the world and infinitely more 
easily worked than mules,” their enthusiastic commander wrote 
the Secretary of War. He rode them, used them as pack animals, 
and as draft animals; he ascertained the advantage of their padded 
feet over the fragile hoofs of mules and horses; he noticed their 
ability to go without a drink, and reported that on one crossing of 
the Southwest he never once went out of his way to give them 
water. A writer from Los Angeles in 1858 wrote that “Gen. 
Beale and about fourteen camels stalked into town last Friday 


1 Stephen Bonsal, Edward Fitzgerald Beale. A Pioneer in the Path of Empire, 1822-1903 
(1912), has rescued this story from its grave among the Government documents. 


460 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


week and gave our streets quite an Oriental aspect.”’ The experi- 
ment convinced Beale that the camel was the solution of the 
traffic problems on the trails, but it convinced few else, and in the 
end the herd was scattered. It is quite probable that the romance 
of the startled miners may have had some foundation in wander- 
ing strays from the camel corps. It is certain that the attempt to 
solve the problem was real, and that this was only one among 
many efforts to lessen the isolation of the scattered camps and to 
draw together the dispersed colonies of Americans throughout the 
West. 

A few months before Porter was sent to the Levant to get his 
camels, Jefferson Davis, the Secretary of War who sent him, was 
engaged in serious study of the preliminary reports of the detach- 
ments of engineers who had been sent upon the plains under legis- 
lation of 1853. Five lines of survey had been run to the Pacific, in 
the search for “the most practicable and economical Route for a 
Railroad,” and most of the surveyors had ended by becoming 
violent partisans of the particular routes that they explored. ““The 
time for a great national railroad has not yet come,” wrote William 
Tecumseh Sherman, who was acquainted with the work. But 
Davis reported to Congress, February 27, 1855, that ““A compari- 
son of the results . . . conclusively shows that the route of the 32d 
parallel is... ‘the most practical and economical route for a rail- 
road from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean.’ This is the 
shortest route... its estimated cost [is] less by a third than that of 
any other of the lines... it could be executed in a vastly shorter 
period.” 

It was perhaps natural for Secretary Davis to believe in the 
southernmost, or thirty-second parallel, route, for it would con- 
nect New Orleans with San Diego, but it was impossible to in- 
duce Congress to authorize construction either here or elsewhere. 
The decade of the surveys passed without action to bridge the 
gap by a railroad, or to bring the settlements on the Pacific, or 
along the roads thither, closer to the States than the ordinary 
means of wagons and horses would accomplish. But pressure for 
quicker service was mounting higher, and Congress was in a mood 
to authorize the marking of wagon roads and the quicker carriage 
of the mails. 

One unforeseen consequence of the great distance to Oregon, 
Utah, and California was unusual isolation. The ordinary frontier 
communities were only a few miles ahead of their immediate pre- 


THE OVERLAND ROUTE 461 


decessors and roads were always in process of construction in their 
immediate rear. Down the Ohio, and up and down the Mississippi, 
and their various tributaries, the communities pushed without 
ever getting bitterly detached. Short cuts, like Zane’s Trace, or 
that to Natchez, could always be relied on to lessen distances, and 
post routes were established to serve the outposts as rapidly as 
these had any need for mails. But it was a different matter to fol- 
low up the emigrants to Oregon and California. The Mormons 
established their own stage and express from the Missouri Border, 
and Congress provided a water route to San Francisco in the 
spring of 1849. The next ten years were years of experiment in the 
methods of overland communication, culminating in the overland 
_mail, the pony express, and at last, the chartering of the Pacific 
railroad. Throughout the decade, no camp was so remote that it 
abandoned the idea of an improved route. From every quarter 
of the Union there came in upon Congress the bewildering de- 
mand for roads and mails. And since the isolated regions were 
mostly in the territories upon the public domain, it was Congress 
rather than any State that must work out the solution. 

The first long distance mail routes were conducted like the 
caravans that used the same trails over which they ran. The car- 
rier, whether for the Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company or 
for the Independence—Santa Fé service of 1849, drove by day and 
camped by night. He made somewhat better time than the emi- 
grant wagon, for he used a lighter vehicle, with a smaller load, but 
the conditions that he had to meet were those of every emigrant. 

A demand for something better arose soon after the admission of 
California, and thereafter the Senators and Representatives of 
this State were ever pressing their needs upon Congress. The rail- 
road surveys of 1853 were in part a response to their urge. The 
Post Office Appropriation Act of 1857 carried authorization for a 
service of a different type. This was to be an expedited mail, with 
wagons running day and night and speeded up by relays of fresh 
stock.’ 

The Postmaster-General was directed by this act to advertise 
for bids for a mail to California in not over twenty-five days from 

2 The best-known account is F. A. Root and W. E. Connelley, Overland Stage to California 
(1901), although Glenn D. Bradley, The Story of the Pony Express (1913), and W. L. 
Visscher, The Pony Express (1908), are of use. Alexander Majors, Seventy Years on the 
Frontier (1893), is the memoir of a freighter. Curtis P. Nettels has searched the local 


sources for his ‘The Overland Mail in the Fifties,’ in Missouri Historical Review, vol. 
XVIII. 


462 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


the Mississippi River. The route was to be selected at his discre- 
tion, but the contractor was to be allowed to hold his contract for 
a period of six years, so that the cost of his investment might be 
spread. The many bidders for the route, in the summer of 1857, 
included most of the freight carriers of the plains. This business 
had already reached a high development, and hundreds of wagons 
were always at work, not for emigrants, but with goods for the 
army posts, or Indians’ annuity goods, or traders’ supplies for 
Santa Fé, or for the mining camps as these appeared. The ro- 
mance associated with the early caravans on the Santa Fé Trail 
had nearly gone. In its place the slow-moving cloud of dust and 
the rumble of the wheels, the cracking of the whips and the profane 
admonitions of the drivers to their mules indicated a growing and 
laborious traffic. A writer in 1860 thought there were eighteen 
thousand freight wagons in constant operation. 

The contract for the overland mail was awarded in the autumn 
of 1857 to John Butterfield, who was given a year to get ready to 
haul the coaches. In his Annual Report of that year the Post- 
master-General explained the award, and the route that had been 
selected. Aaron V. Brown, the Postmaster-General, was a south- 
ern man, and an appointee in the cabinet of a Democratic Presi- 
dent, James Buchanan. His preferences may have been like those 
of Jefferson Davis, for the Kansas war was now on, and the line 
between the factions was sharply drawn. But there was much to 
justify his decision that the route should start with two eastern 
termini at St. Louis and Memphis, making a junction near Fort 
Smith on the western boundary of Arkansas, crossing Red River 
near Preston, Texas, thence west across Texas to El Paso, and into 
California by the Fort Yuma entrance. Nothing could convince 
the northern critics that this selection was not wholly due to poli- 
tics. Yet there was reason in a route that would not be snowed up 
and impassable for several months each winter and that would cross 
the mountains at as low and practicable elevations as possible. 

A special reason for avoiding the central trail in 1857 was the 
fact that in this year the Mormon Church was at war with the 
United States, resisting the authority of Federal officers. An army 
was on the plains, under command of Colonel Albert Sidney John- 
ston, with orders to bring the rebellious church to terms; but at the 
moment when the contract was let, it was still uncertain whether 
they would be his terms, or those of Brigham Young. In Septem- 
ber, 1857, an emigrant party from Arkansas to California was 


THE OVERLAND ROUTE 463 


brutally massacred at Mountain Meadows in Utah by John D. 
Lee, and it was commonly believed that the Mormon Church was 
officially responsible for the outrage.’ The inability of the United 
States to police the central trail was good reason for running the 
mails another way. 

On September 15, 1858, Butterfield started his stages on a semi- 
weekly service from San Francisco to Tipton, Missouri (then the 
western terminus of the railroad from St. Louis to Kansas City). 
The distance as the route ran was 2795 miles, and the first east- 
bound coach, carrying an inspector of the Post Office, made the 
trip in twenty-four days, eighteen hours, thirty-five minutes actual 
time. “I cordially congratulate you upon the result,”’ President 
_ Buchanan telegraphed to the successful contractor. “It is a glori- 
ous triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements will soon 
follow the course of the road, and the East and West will be 
bound together by a chain of living Americans which can never be 
broken.” 

It was indeed a triumph of a sort, for Butterfield had been busily 
at work during his year of preparation, constructing a plant across 
the plains. In order to keep the stages running at the required 
average of nearly five miles per hour, day and night, it was neces- 
sary to have fresh teams ready for the stage at intervals of not 
much more than ten miles. There were no roads, and the wagons 
were hauled over the uneven plains where the going was least 
rough. It was heavy pulling at best. At worst, there were streams 
to ford, mud holes to get mired in, rocky sections where progress 
could not be made faster than a walk, and occasional smooth 
stretches where the animals could be urged to a gallop. The ro- 
mantic artists have generally pictured the overland stages swaying 
and tossing as the horses were driven at a run; it would be more 
truthful to show their slow plod through shifting sands. 

As close together as fresh relays were needed, Butterfield built 
him a cabin and a corral, and stationed a stock tender. His 
freight wagons hauled hay and grain for the animals to these sta-. 
tions, and were ever at work replenishing their stores. When the 
stage drove in, the tired horses were unharnessed, and waiting 
teams were brought up to replace them; while the tired passengers 
in the coach climbed down to stretch their legs. Less often than 
the horses, the passengers and drivers needed attention, and every 


2 J.P. Dunn, Massacres of the Mountains. A History of the Indian Wars of the Far West 
(1886). ili 4 


464 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


few stations came a “home station” where in addition to the cor- 
ral and haystack, there was a house, an eating place and perhaps 
a blacksmith or wheelwright. In the arid waste, tires fell from 
shrunken fellies and the wheel was in danger of shaking apart un- 
less promptly repaired. There is a frequent picture of the overland 
traveler in forced camp by some stream, while the wheels were 
soaking to swell out and hold the tires in place. The rough roads 
were hard on hoofs as well as wheels. ‘The blacksmith was always 
in demand, and sore-footed animals, resting in the corrals, were a 
constant expense of the establishment. 

At the home stations food could be procured, but not beds, for 
the traveler kept going without a rest. “‘’T'wenty-four mortal days 
and nights — twenty-five being schedule time — must be spent in 
that ambulance; passengers becoming crazy with whisky, mixed 
with want of sleep, are often obliged to be strapped to their seats; 
their meals, dispatched during their ten-minute halts, are simply 
abominable, the heats are excessive, the climate malarious; lamps 
may not be used at night for fear of non-existent Indians; briefly 
there is no end to this Via Mala’s miseries,’’ wrote one traveler 
who knew how to live in many lands. 

The Abbott-Downing coach, which in the course of time be- 
came the standard wagon on the trail, was built at Concord, New 
Hampshire, for a generation before it was tested on the plains. At 
a pinch it could carry fourteen passengers, nine of them inside, and 
five, including the driver, on the box or on the roof seat. Its wide- 
tired, heavy wheels were nearly as capable as those of the prairie 
schooner. Its body was slung on stout leather braces, and was 
sheltered from the weather by leather curtains. At the rear of the 
body was a projecting “boot”? with leather cover, in which the 
scanty luggage of the passengers was carried. Twenty-five pounds 
of personal baggage was the usual allowance for the three weeks’ 
journey; and the unavoidable hardships of the trip made it not 
surprising that many of the passengers carried almost their whole 
allowance in a jug. It was on the boot that the mail sacks were 
packed, and if there was more mail than could be accommodated 
here, the sacks rode inside, to the exclusion of passengers. Mails 
had the right of way under the contract, and passengers must 
yield to them if necessary. In the trip that Clemens made to 
Nevada, he and his brother were the only passengers. He de- 
scribed in unfading language their struggle with the sacks that 
shared the interior of the coach, and the experiences in learning to 


THE OVERLAND ROUTE 465 


sleep while riding the box with the driver. It was a triumph of 
organization to run the overland stage to California, and a feat of 
endurance to survive the trip. 

Under the contract of 1857, Butterfield was to receive $600,000 
a year for three years, but during the first year of operation the 
Government receipts from his route were only $27,229.94. The 
Postmaster-General described it, in a flush of enthusiasm over its 
inception, as a “‘conclusive and triumphant success”’; but the next 
year, 1859, he was sobered by the slight revenue from it, and re- 
ported that, “Until a railroad shall have been constructed across 
the continent, the conveyance of the Pacific mails overland must 
be regarded as wholly impracticable.’ The service was to be justi- 

fied upon national grounds, if at all, but the Postmaster-General 
- thought the cost was excessive. There were in addition to the 
overland stage two not-expedited services, one from St. Joseph by 
way of Albuquerque to Stockton, California, and one from Inde- 
pendence to Salt Lake and Placerville. Each of these brought in a 
- revenue negligible in relation to its cost. 

The arrival of the railroad at St. Joseph, in 1859, established a 
new convenient point of departure from the Missouri River, but 
the Butterfield mail coaches continued to run over the line opened 
in 1858, until the Civil War compelled a rearrangement of the 
system. The heaviest freight was hauled over the Platte trail, in 
spite of the Post Office decision that the Texas route was superior. 
The tide of emigration to the Pacific that poured over the Platte 
trail after 1842 never slackened in its use of this as the most 
practicable for summer travel. When it became necessary in 
March, 1861, to take the overland mail away from danger of Con- 
federate interference, there was enough equipment already along 
the Platte and the California Trail beyond it, to make the shift an 
easy one. 

No single influence did more to give prominence to the Platte 
trail than the decision to use it for the pony express, which was 
started in 1860. The execution of this project was largely the work 
of Alexander Majors, of the freighting firm of Russell, Majors, and 
Waddell; its promotion was due to Senator Gwin of California. 
Gwin, who wanted a railroad, accepted the survey of 1853 as 
better than nothing. He induced Congress to allow the expedited 
mail service of 1858, but was not contented with it. The develop- 
ment of Colorado and Nevada, with their mining camps not far 
from the direct road to California, reinforced his demands for a 


466 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


relay pony service, unencumbered by stages or passengers, that 
might carry important mail through to the coast in much less than 
the twenty-five days of the Butterfield contract. Through his. 
insistence the private firm organized the pony express, with 
blooded horses stationed at relays from nine to fifteen miles apart. 
Light men, or boys, were hired as riders, and drilled to rush 
through the Indian Country unarmed, relying on speed for their 
protection. On April 3, 1860, the express was begun, with riders 
starting simultaneously at each end; at Sacramento, and at Atchi- 
son, Kansas, across the river from St. Joseph. Their first run beat 
the best record of the overiand mail coach by two weeks, and they 
promised a ten-day schedule. Their best run carried Lincoln’s 
inaugural address to Sacramento in seven days and seventeen 
hours. Although they charged a fee of five dollars for the smallest 
tissue letter that was bundled into the saddlebags, the express 
was never a financial success. The Post Office objected to it be- 
cause of the law against private mail services. In October, 1861, it 
ceased, partly because the money of the firm was gone and Russell, 
Majors, and Waddell were bankrupt; but more because on October 
26, 1861, the Pacific telegraph was open, with a line 3595 miles in 
length, from New York to San Francisco. 

In the summer of 1861, the Platte trail was a national highway, 
with as much significance and as great a length as any continuous 
road has had. The pony express riders were upon it, and the over- 
land stages. The freighters were innumerable, the wagons of 
prospectors and farmers moving west were much in evidence. 
There was little tendency to permanent settlement anywhere 
along the line, but the mining population was developing junction 
points at short intervals, where branch roads led off into the new 
diggings, and brought back not only the gold as dug but the im- 
perative demand for more wagons, more mails, more roads, and a 
railroad to the Pacific. Butterfield and Russell, Majors, and Wad- 
dell drop out of the story soon after 1861. Their place is taken by 
the picturesque Ben Holladay, a man ignorant of letters but full 
of the enterprise and gambler’s instinct that made him for the next 
four years a magnate among the traffic organizers of the plains. 
He sold out in 1866 to the rival firm of Wells, Fargo, and Company, 
an organization that lived so long as to forget its freighting origin, 
and to become one of the greatest of the railroad express com- 
panies. 

The organization of the peerlend mail could not have occurred 


THE OVERLAND ROUTE 467 


before the war with Mexico, for the United States had no real in- 
terest on the Pacific; it could not have lasted beyond 1869, for in 
that year the railroad was finished. It rose and fell within two 
decades, and never was it looked upon as more than a temporary 
institution, since even before it was conceived there was a general 
conviction that a railroad would be built as soon as Congress could 
surmount the sectional and local partisanship that blocked the 
selection of any route. 

As the fifties advanced, the number of competing routes was 
reduced and standardized. Secretary Davis surveyed five in all 
under the law of 1853, but there were not five that survived the 
test of criticism. The northernmost was discarded for practical 
purposes, in spite of the enthusiastic commendation which Stev- 
ens, its surveyor, gave it. It was too academic to talk of a line 
from Minnesota to Washington, with no population on either 
Lake Michigan or Puget Sound at the ends, and neither population 
nor important resources along it. The middlemost was discarded 
as well. It was a hobby with Senator Benton to urge that best of 
all the routes was one along the thirty-seventh parallel, through 
the Sangre de Cristo Range of southern Colorado. No suitable 
direct grade was discovered here, or has been since; and the gorge 
of the Colorado River was as real a barrier to it as the mountains, 
but Benton persisted in advocating it, and Frémont made an inde- 
pendent survey for it. With these two possibilities eliminated, 
there remained the line of the Platte trail, where every one had 
known since 1835 that a railroad could be built, and the two 
southern lines known as the thirty-fifth parallel route, through 
Albuquerque, and the thirty-second parallel route, Davis’s choice, 
from New Orleans, through El Paso and Fort Yuma. 

In the decade of deadlock, there was nearly always a railroad 
bill’ before Congress, though there was no possibility of its passage. 
Senator Douglas, in 1855, the session after his triumph with 
Kansas-Nebraska, had a politicians’ bill for three complete rail- 
roads — northern, central, and southern. There was no need for 
more than one, and no belief that even one could earn dividends, 
but he was ambitious on any terms to build a line through the 
Indian Country that he had subdivided. His bill passed the Sen- 
ate, but met in the House the opposition of Benton, who had now 
lost his Senate seat and was obliged to content himself with the 
status of a Representative from the St. Louis district. Benton 
amended the Douglas bill to provide for one central trunk line 


468 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


and three eastern feeders over the plains to Lake Superior, Mis- 
souri, or lowa, and Memphis. The bill failed to become a law, and 
at no time before the Civil War was there a better chance to pass 
one. 

While Congress was deadlocked over the matter of route, the 
machinery for building such a road, when authorized, was being 
developed. There was a long debate whether it should be by the 
Government, as Benton wished, or by a private promoter with 
Government aid, as Whitney wished. Before 1857 it is likely that 
if a road had been authorized it could have been Government- 
built. After the financial experiences of that year the Government 
could not be driven into business. 

But there was a well-developed procedure for Government aid 
which Douglas had launched in his Illinois Central Bill of 1850. 
The public lands were there, miles of them unbroken by any 
plough. If it was reasonable to give millions of acres of the most 
fertile land of Iowa, Illinois, or Wisconsin to aid in railroad build- 
ing, it was more reasonable to extend even greater aid to railroads 
on the plains, where not many as yet expected ever to see a crop. 
The Illinois Central grant was followed by demands from every 
western State for similar generosity, and some of the eastern 
States asked why if the West was to receive lands for railroads, 
the East should not receive lands for something else. It was an- 
swered to this that the railroad land grants were not a gift but an 
investment by the Government, and that through their use the 
value of what remained was more than doubled. The Government 
sections within the limits of the railroad grants were held at double 
minimum price, or $2.50 per acre. President Fillmore approved 
railroad grants amounting to 8,198,593 acres; Pierce approved 
grants of 19,687,179 acres more. The prevailing type of grant was 
like that to Illinois for the use of the Illinois Central; six sections 
per mile of track, to be selected alternately with indemnity limits 
of fifteen miles on either side. The policy of extending aid of this 
sort was continued through the Civil War and down to 1871. 
When Donaldson summed the matter up in 1880, for record in his 
Public Domain, the land grant railroads actually built amounted 
to 15,430 miles, and it was estimated that their lands would exceed 
155,000,000 acres. 

A group of business men in California launched the enterprise 
that eventually was finished as the Union Pacific Railroad. Leland 
Stanford, governor of the State, Collis P. Huntington, Charles C. 


THE OVERLAND ROUTE 469 


Crocker, and Theodore D. Judah were interested in the charter 
issued to the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California early 
in 1861. Judah was the engineer, and ran a survey along the main 
trail to the Carson Valley that summer. He found nothing but 
engineering difficulties, for the California end of a railroad was 
obliged to climb the continental divide and to indulge in heavy 
mountain construction. Judah was an enthusiast, however, and 
hurried to Washington that autumn with plans and profiles. He 
had the support of the California delegation in Congress, as well as 
the advantage brought to his project by the Civil War. 

Before the Civil War there was a reasonable choice among the 
three best routes, but after secession the two southern lines were 
out of the question for the same reason that shifted the overland 
mail to the Platte trail in 1861. There could be no national rail- 
road in Confederate country, and even Missouri was ruled out, as 
somewhat dangerous. In the summer of 1861, it was not yet cer- 
tain whether this State would cast its lot with the South or remain 
in the Union. Judah died that winter before his lobby was success- 
ful, but on July 1, 1862, a bill was signed by Lincoln to carry out 
his enterprise. 

It was provided in this bill that a railroad should be constructed 
from the western border of the State of Iowa to San Francisco 
Bay, by various corporations already in existence, and one that 
was to be chartered directly for the purpose. The Central Pacific 
of California was to construct the western end, within the limits of 
that State. From the eastern boundary of California, to a point on 
the one hundredth meridian, the Union Pacific Railroad Com- 
pany was to do the work. East of this meridian were to be four 
branches to Missouri River points at Kansas City, Atchison, Coun- 
cil Bluffs, and Sioux City. The main line to Council Bluffs was 
left to the Union Pacific, the others were ascribed to various 
corporations. 

Private corporations were to build the railroad along the route 
now crowded with the wagons of the overland service. But the 
Government was to aid in various ways, by right of way, by land 
endowment, and by a loan of credit. The right of way was stated 
as four hundred feet, with extra ground as needed for yards or sid- 
ings, and with the privilege of cutting wood and stone from ad- 
jacent portions of the public domain. The land grant was to con- 
sist of ten sections per mile of track. The loan of credit was to be 
secured by a first mortgage on the finished railroad and was te 


470 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


be in form of United States bonds, advanced at the rate of sixteen 
thousand dollars per mile of track. 

The passage of the Union Pacific Act did not build the road, and 
although its promoters were urging it as a war measure, the Civil 
War was ended before serious construction began. But the act 
opened a new period in railroad legislation, and in the disposal of 
lands. The old fiction of granting the lands to the States instead 
of directly to the roads was abandoned now. This road was to 
operate in the territories rather than in the States, and the sensi- 
tive southern consciences were gone. The northern members of 
Congress had no aversion to the idea of direct Federal aid. The 
overland route was thus the occasion for establishing a new wide- 
open policy of treatment of the public domain. The policy became 
even wider before the railroad spanned the route. 


CHAPTER L 
THE PUBLIC LANDS: WIDE OPEN 


THERE were no railroad land grants made by Congress in the 
Administration of James Buchanan, 1857-1861. There occurred 
instead the last stand of the sectional influences against the newer 
view of National power and responsibility that was gaining ground 
through the logic of events and the advocacy of the western States. 
Discussion there was in abundance, and had Congress been left 
free to act there would have been legislative results, for the Re- 
- publican Party was gaining in strength every month. Many of the 
Democrats from the North and West were willing to vote with 
them. But Buchanan stood true to the political alliance that he 
represented and ‘had no comprehension that the United States 
might become a government of action. Whatever bills escaped 
- destruction in committee or in either House, he vetoed. In his 
veto messages of the Homestead Bill and the Morrill Act may be 
found classic and final statements of the Philosophy that Calhoun 
had elaborated to protect the South. During these four years of 
deadlock various western forces were dammed up, any one of 
which might have gained in time enough head to break the dam. 
One was the demand for a railroad to the Pacific, and land grants 
for other lines; this was partly successful before Buchanan was 
elected and waited for final fulfillment until after he retired. A 
second was the evolution of agricultural outlook that beheld the 
passing of the simple farmer, at work with only his own hands and 
ancient tools, and that saw rising to change his task the various 
aids of science and machinery. A third was the swelling demand of 
the free-soil West, repeating the old formula that it was an out- 
rage to charge the pioneer for the farm that he created and insist- 
ing that the United States grant him a homestead. All of these 
found their best expression through the leaders of the Republican 
Party, and all were successful in the first Republican Administra- 
tion. 

The Union Pacific Act, assuaging one of these demands, was 
partly founded on the notion that it was good business to give 
away half the region affected by a railroad, in order to double the 
value of the other half. But the American farmer was now think- 


472 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ing of more than mere acreage and original cost, as he considered the 
factors of success. Thus far his agriculture had been laborious in 
its execution, and primitive in theory and in practice. He was now 
conscious that science and mechanics might affect his profits. 
The conservatism and ignorance of the rustic has been a familiar 
theme since the dawn of history. The more sophisticated classes 
in society have looked upon the farmers with a mixture of con- 
tempt and scorn, while literature has invariably depended on 
them to furnish the material for humor and burlesque. The isola- 
tion of the farmer in a roadless world accounts for much of this; 
the routine character of his work and the conditions under which 
it must be performed, account for the rest. Farming early became 
a conventional task, in which formal education had no part, and 
in which from father to son, by precept and example, the routine 
methods were handed down. The simple tools, plough, flail, and 
sickle appear in the earliest of our pictorial records. They were in 
use when America was discovered, little changed from their forms 
of antiquity. The frontier farmer, and indeed the farmer every- 
where, was using them almost unmodified when the American 
States gained their independence. The settlers of the Appalachian 
valleys knew only this sort of agriculture, helped out by some ro- 
tation of crops and rule-of-thumb selective breeding of domestic 
animals. ‘The children of the valleys picked it up and carried it 
down the Ohio to the West. Through inheritance and isolation it 
was hard to prove that anything they knew was wrong, or that a 
better method was good enough to overcome the curse of novelty. 
The American farmers suffered for their conservatism and the 
backwardness of agriculture, and out of their suffering emerged 
the remedy. It was not long after the settlements pushed into the 
Great Valley before the farmers of the seaboard found that they 
could not meet the competition of the frontier. The wheat and 
corn of the virgin farms came cheaper to the market than the 
farmers on the older fields could raise them. Each new improve- 
ment of a road intensified this competition somewhere. It was 
true that sometimes the spread of settlement brought better soil 
into use. More often the old farm had been used up. The soil was 
exhausted by repeated cropping, which the partial rotation did not 
cure. The use of manures was rare, for domestic animals were 
mostly out at pasture. Commercial fertilizers were not known, 
except that perhaps lime was sometimes used to sweeten soil. 
The movement to improve the method of agriculture began with 


THE PUBLIC LANDS: WIDE OPEN 473 


eastern farmers who felt it necessary to fight off competition, or 
who responded to the idea that the country gentleman needed to 
set a good example. Some of them imported at great expense 
blooded rams and bulls as sires. Diomed, the great race horse that 
won the first Derby at Epsom in 1780, was brought to America in 
his old age to head the stud of a Virginia gentleman. Agricultural 
societies, with exhibitions and prizes for country produce, became 
common early in the nineteenth century. And as region after 
region passed out of its era of primitive fecundity, its people turned 
eagerly to whatever might sustain its prosperity. 

The German universities took the lead in substituting science 
for tradition as a guide for agriculture. The chemical experiments 
of Liebig at Giessen were paralleled and followed with such in- 
‘tensity, that by 1850 something was known of the theories of 
fertility. The publication of the Origin of Species (1858) brought 
down upon Charles Darwin’s head the reproaches of theology, but 
gave a new reasonableness to the ideas of selective breeding of 
animals and plants. Before 1860 there was much that could be 
learned respecting the connection between science and agriculture, 
and a demand arose for a technical education that might train 
young men to be better farmers than their fathers. In 1857 Michi- 
gan broke ground in this direction by creating the first American 
State College of Agriculture. Iowa followed in 1858, Minnesota 
in 1859, and the drive was on whose natural direction in the West 
must be a demand for Federal aid in the propagation of agricul- 
tural theory. 

Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, chairman of the Committee on 
Agriculture in the House of Representatives, took the lead in Con- 
gress and became the father of the agricultural colleges. He 
brought in his first bill in the winter after the panic of 1857, when 
the frontier was ipa in depression, and ready for any remedy. 
In his speeches defending the measure, Morrill dwelt upon the 
larger social consequences of agricultural education. He described 
the injury wrought by the drift of young people from the farm to 
the city, and the usefulness to the Republic of a solvent, intelli- 
gent, agricultural class. The cities of 1857 were filling, also, with 
new immigrants; and in politics an active nativist movement was 
reinforcing any arguments that would lead in strengthening the 
American element in the American population. The Morrill Act 
passed the House at once, and the Senate at the next session. 
Buchanan vetoed it in February, 1859. 


474 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


“The Constitution,” declared Buchanan, as he gave expression 
to the reasons animating the last stand of the old school, “‘is a 
grant to Congress of a few enumerated but most important 
powers ... which can be best or alone exercised beneficially by the 
common Government. All other powers are reserved to the States 
and to the people. For the efficient and harmonious working of 
both, it is necessary that their several spheres of action should be 
kept distinct from each other. ‘This alone can prevent conflict and 
mutual injury. Should the time ever arrive when the State gov- 
ernments shall look to the Federal Treasury for the means of 
supporting themselves and maintaining their systems of education 
and internal policy, the character of both Governments will be 
greatly deteriorated.”’ He regarded the grant of lands as extrava- 
gant and unwise in a time of depression. The basis of the proposed 
distribution was twenty thousand acres for each Senator and 
Representative; the lands to go to the State concerned for the 
“‘endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college 
where the leading subject shall be, without excluding other scien- 
tific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are 
related to agriculture and the mechanic arts ...in order to pro- 
mote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes 
in the several pursuits and professions in life.” The provision for 
industrial education was a graft upon the parent idea, as the 
Mobile and Ohio provision had been upon Douglas’s Illinois Cen- 
tral Bill. The real motive of the act was agricultural education; 
but it was necessary to win over city votes. 

The veto checked the movement for the present, but the Morrill 
Act was revived in 1862, passed without any serious debate, and 
signed by Lincoln the day after he approved the Union Pacific 
Bill. The delay resulted only in increasing the amount of the 
grant from twenty thousand acres per representative to thirty 
thousand. It was provided that each State, where possible, should 
take the lands from the unassigned public domain within its 
limits. As Buchanan had pointed out, however, some four fifths 
of the amount went to States in which there were no lands. These 
received land scrip for the appropriate number of acres. They 
were not permitted to locate the lands themselves, and become 
owners of real estate within the limits of another State, but they 
were at liberty to sell or assign the scrip and use the proceeds for 
the purpose of the act. In all, 9,600,000 acres were thus allotted 
in the next few years, in addition to 1,165,520 acres already given 


THE PUBLIC LANDS: WIDE OPEN 475 


to the State universities, and 67,893,919 acres accruing to the 
States in the shape of sections sixteen and thirty-six, for the 
common schools. 

Science, invited to the aid of the farmer, was slow in coming. 
Every State, in time, accepted the gift under the Morrill Act and 
opened one or more agricultural schools. Morrill had not debated 
the educational side of his proposal as fully as the social, and Con- 
gress had not even tried to examine the educational leaders of the 
day as to the practicability of the scheme. Higher education was 
almost entirely classical in 1862. Eliot had not yet begun his 
revolutionary attack upon the Harvard curriculum, and the col- 
lege or university presidents, clerical for the most part, would have 
had little to suggest to help the new establishments. It was long 
before the agricultural colleges taught enough agriculture to 
justify themselves. The experiment stations that were to mean 
much for agriculture in the next half-century, were slow in starting 
and had technique to develop as well as personnel to train. But 
the movement was begun to educate the most conservative of 
classes and abolish the rustic. 

Mechanics came sooner to the farmer’s aid than science, and 
here the United States led the world. In Europe the supply of 
land was relatively limited and was all appropriated; while labor 
was plentiful and cheap. Hand labor survived long under these 
conditions, and the incentive to devise labor-saving machines was 
less than in America, where the supply of land was unlimited, and 
every farmer’s profits were measured by the acreage he could 
cultivate. The ingenuity of Eli Whitney brought about a revolu- 
tion in cotton culture, and innumerable other minds were induced 
to work on other inventions. The contractors on the Erie Canal 
and the National Road experimented with contrivances to pull 
stumps and move dirt by wholesale. Nearly every village black- 
smith shop concealed some device on which the craftsman worked 
when business was slack, and over whose future development his 
mind strayed to dreams of wealth. 

Typical of these was Robert McCormick, a Scotch-Irish resi- 
dent of the Shenandoah Valley. Farmer and blacksmith by turn, 
he watched the procession of emigrants to the western lands and 
himself worked on one of the most alluring of the problems, that 
of harvesting the wheat crop. His neighbors cut their wheat with 
the heavy cradle, and brought in the crop only after the most 
wearisome labor of the farmer’s cycle. The cradle was an improve- 


476 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ment upon the scythe, for it left the grain neatly piled on the 
ground, ready to be bunched and bound; and the scythe was in 
its turn an improvement over the sickle with which grain had been 
harvested since the dawn of history. But sickle, scythe, and 
cradle all involved heavy and slow manual labor, whereas the crop, 
when ready to be harvested, needed to be cut at once. The limit 
on wheat production was not the acreage that could be planted, 
but the amount that could be cut, bound, and stacked in the few 
days after it was ripe and before it spilled. Mechanics, every- 
where, were searching for the solution, as McCormick was. About 
1831 he gave it up. It was not hard to devise a machine to cut dry, 
erect, wheat straw, on even ground; but to get one that would | 
operate over rough terrain, with the straw wet, soft, and tangled 
by summer storms, was more than he could do. 

In the year that Robert McCormick gave it up, his son Cyrus 
H. McCormick built a model that would work.! It can probably 
never be determined how much Cyrus learned from his father’s 
efforts, and what he devised himself, although his father and his 
brothers joined in declaring him to be the inventor of the reaper 
that he patented in 1834. The basic elements that McCormick 
included in his machine remain in the structure of the most ad- 
vanced harvesters to-day. There was a reciprocating knife, with 
triangular, saw-tooth blades, each protected by a conical sheath. 
The conical sheaths were thrust among the stalks as the reaper 
advanced, while a great reel overhead swept the grain against the 
sheaths and the knives that worked in and out among them. The 
grain fell as cut upon a horizontal platform built in the rear of the 
knives, and the operator, with his rake, gathered the stalks into 
convenient sheaves from off this platform. The binder was added 
a generation later, and the thresher was improved and refined, but 
the McCormick invention was the turning point for agriculture 
from a hand industry to one of science and machinery. 

There were three reasons why the reaper was slow in being 
adopted by the farmers of the West. One was their conservatism, 
that made them reluctant to believe that it would work. It was 
several years before the inventor could find a buyer for his first 
machine. A second was the semi-mountainous country in which 


1 Herbert N. Casson, The Romance of the Reaper (1908), and Cyrus Hall McCormick: 
His Life and Work (1909), are too superficial to do their theme justice. Reuben G. Thwaites, 
“Cyrus H. McCormick and the Reaper,” was prepared from the papers of the McCormick 
family and printed in State Historical Society of Wisconsin Proceedings, 1908; but the 
treasures of the important agricultural library of the McCormicks are yet to be worked. 


THE PUBLIC LANDS: WIDE OPEN 477 


it was invented. The harvesting capacity of the reaper was so 
_ great that a farmer needed for it larger fields than the valley of 
_ Virginia afforded. At best it was an expensive machine that could 
be used only a few days in the year. The modern thresherman has 
surmounted this by beginning to harvest the wheat on the south- 
ern plains, and then following the crop as it ripens to the northern- 
most limits. But the early farmer needed more acreage before he 
could use the reaper to advantage. The third obstacle was the 
fact that it involved an additional need for capital. The farmer 
was used to buying his land, but did not control much more capital 
than was needed for this. His tools were all cheap, and many of 
them he could make himself. In order to prepare his mind for the 
new outlay, and to procure the means to finance it, much educa- 
tion and preparation was in order. As these were done, the farmer 
became a business oa, and broke with the old traditions of 
agriculture. 

McCormick sold his first reapers in the early forties, as farmers 
recovered from the depression of 1837. Hesold them himself, be- 
ing both manufacturer and salesman, and in the course of his 
travels, he discovered the endless prairies of northern Illinois, 
where a wheat field might run for miles without a hill to throw the 
reaper off its course. In 1847, when he was disposing of some two 
hundred machines a year, he moved his factory from the rolling 
country of the Shenandoah to Chicago. If his fellow townsmen 
had known it, his arrival was more significant for them than the 
Rivers and Harbors Convention over which they were much ex- 
cited that summer. There was no railroad in Chicago as yet, and 
the Illinois Canal was incomplete, but McCormick picked out 
Chicago to become the center of a new kind of agriculture, and 
pioneer of a new era. In 1851 the inventor, now possessing an im- 
proved machine that had grown with the tests of use, took the 
reaper to the World’s Fair at London and demonstrated before a 
hostile audience that in agricultural machinery the United States 
could lead the world. The use of the reaper spread with the fron- 
tier of the fifties. At the end of the decade the McCormick plant 
was turning out four thousand a year, and had built up extensive 
side lines of other agricultural machines, while rival manufacturers 
were contesting his patent rights and offering the farmer a range 
of choice. 

The availability of the new agricultural machinery came at the 
moment when the obstructions to the freest use of the public 


478 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


domain were breaking down, and when railroads had so far sup- 
plemented the older water routes that the crop could get to a 
market wherever it was raised. The changes that came with the 
machines, caused by them in part, and in part by the opening of 
the rural mind to science, were far-reaching in their consequences. 
Of course they saved labor, making many thousands of men free 
to fill the Union armies in the Civil War. They educated the 
farmer, making him at once business man, mechanic, and a large 
employer of labor, and thus helping to break up the isolation of the 
rural class. And they increased the rate at which it was possible 
for the West to absorb the farm lands of the public domain. The 
profits to be got out of wholesale agriculture had once before stimu- 
lated the South to push the area of cotton culture. It now inspired 
the West to push to fulfillment the homestead policy. ‘ 

There was an inconsistency in the western demands that broke 
down the last of the restrictions on the lands. Every community 
wanted railroads so badly that it was willing to vote alternate 
sections for every line. It was clear that these grants could not 
produce revenue for the roads unless they were sold, and the sec- 
tions which the Government retained were held at double-mini- 
mum, and yet the West advocated them. 

The grants of lands to the States for education in general, or 
agricultural education, or public works, had again little value un- 
less the lands were sold at a profit. Yet it was possible for a west- 
ern spokesman to advocate all these and still believe that the 
Government ought to give a free farm to each citizen who would 
reclaim it. 

The inconsistency between using the lands to raise money, and 
giving them away, was clear to the Free Soil Democrats, who, in 
1852, included in their platform a specific demand for a homestead 
policy, declaring, “‘That the. public lands of the United States be- 
long to the people, and should not be sold to individuals nor 
granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for 
the benefit of the people, and should be granted in limited quanti- 
ties, free of cost, to landless settlers.’’ The inconsistency became 
clear enough to the settlers, too, in the decade that followed the 
Civil War. But during the fifties the West wanted both railroads 
and free farms and failed to realize that one might block the other. 

There would have been a homestead law before the Civil War, 
if it had not been for James Buchanan. The movement for free 
lands was approaching a head, and within the new Republican 


THE PUBLIC LANDS: WIDE OPEN 479 


Party there were few who did not believe in the policy.? A law per- 
mitting any head of a family or alien who had declared his inten- 
tion to become a citizen, to occupy a quarter section for five years, 
and then buy it for twenty-five cents an acre, passed both houses 
of Congress in the summer of 1860. It did not make the land free, 
but the reduction in price was so sweeping that the homestead 
opinion accepted the law as a fair compromise and called it, “A 
Bill to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Do- 
main.” Buchanan vetoed it for the same reasons that induced him 
to veto the Morrill Act of the year before: it was in his opinion 
unfair and unconstitutional. It was not expedient, he thought, 
“‘to proclaim to all the nations of the earth that whoever shall 
arrive in this country from a foreign shore, and declare his inten- 
tion to become a citizen, shall receive a farm of 160 acres, at a cost 
of 25 or 20 cents an acre, if he will only reside on it and cultivate 
it.” This was, however, the stand not only of the adherents of the 
revenue theory of the public lands and of the strict construction- 
— ists who denied the powers of the Government, but also of the sec- 
tions that feared the growth of a free farming West that might 
overbalance the South. 
| Lincoln signed the Homestead Bill, May 20, 1862. The only 
result of Buchanan’s veto was to delay the policy two years, and 
abolish the price of twenty-five cents an acre. Its privileges were 
now extended to “‘any person who is the head of a family, or who 
has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and 1s a citizen of the 
United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention 
to become such,”’ with the exception made necessary by the war 
then raging, ““and who has never borne arms against the United 
States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies.” 

The homesteader was allowed a quarter-section of minimum 
lands, or half a quarter of double-minimum, on five years of resi- 
dence and cultivation. The Pre-Emption Act was not repealed, 
but remained in force for those who did not desire to acquire title 
by residence or cultivation; and any homesteader was specifically 
allowed, at any time after his original entry upon the lands, to 
commute his homestead entry to a preémption, and buy the land 
at the regular price. 

On January 1, 1863, the first homesteaders made their entry on 
the public domain, the agricultural college lands were made readv 


J mes T. Dubois and Gertrude S. Mathews, Galusha A. Grow, Father of the Homestead 
Law (1917), naturally gives Grow more credit than he earned. 


480 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


for the States, and the railroad lands were held before the eyes of 
railroad builders to speed their efforts. The public lands were 
entered upon the last great period of their existence; to remain. 
wide open for the next twenty-five years, until they were closed 
not by a change of policy but by the fact that the resources of the 
Nation were exhausted. In the census of 1880, and in the Report 
of the Commissioner of the General Land Office for that year, it 
was noted that practically all of the farm land had been taken up. 
The open frontier disappeared, and with it vanished the most 
American of all the American forces that have operated on society. 
After 1862 the history of the American Frontier is in its final 
chapters. 


CHAPTER LI 
THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR 


THE influence of the Civil War in making the United States a 
nation has long been a theme of patriotic writers and orators. 
They have pointed out how Lincoln’s decision to maintain the 
Union, and the consolidating forces let loose by the military opera- 
tions of the United States, changed the character of the Federal 
Government. A fair implication from many of their interpreta- 
tions is that if there had been no Civil War the United States 
would have remained a loose Government, without power and 
without program. | 

From the standpoint of the plainsman, or the prairie farmer 
who appeared a generation before him, the error of this theory of 
_American history is much like that of the statesman of the Old 
South, whose information as to American development ceased to 
grow after the Mexican War. The course of industry and trans- 
port, after the panic of 1837, had but one end, and that was an 
interstate organization of the business of the United States and a 
growing pressure upon Congress to provide the machinery for its 
direction and control. 

The historian who finds the key to nationality in the Civil War 
has given too little attention to the necessary implications of the 
building of the railroads, the multiplication of territories, the land 
grant policies, and the complications these created. The Middle 
West and the Far West were the political creatures of the United 
States and looked to the Nation for codrdination and support. 
They looked thus before the Civil War and kept on looking during 
that momentous struggle. New reasons for their dependence 
sprang up during the war itself, and were disconnected with it. 
The only effect the Civil War had on the Pacific railroads and the 
Homestead Act was to delay their accomplishment. The mining 
camps demanded roads, railroads, and post offices, without refer- 
ence to the war, and the mere fact of their existence implied a 
necessary enlargement of the activities of the National Govern- 
ment in the ensuing years. 

But.the error of the historical interpreter is one of the study and 
the library, subject to correction and repair. The error of the 


482 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


statesmen of the Old South was more costly, for it deprived their 
calculations of a vital factor, whose presence and proper appraisal 
might have altered the course of history. They believed that the 
whole Mississippi Valley, including the tributary basin of the 
Ohio, was still bound up with the current of the Father of Waters 
and that true western interest must forever lie with that power 
which should be able to control the outlet of the Mississippi at 
New Orleans. This was good doctrine for James Wilkinson and 
inspired a wise policy in the Spanish rulers who bought off the 
leaders of the Old West. It was good doctrine for Thomas Jeffer- 
son, too, who was driven by it to buy Louisiana and preserve the 
Union. It was not bad doctrine in the forties and early fifties, 
_ when the steamboat traffic of the Mississippi was at its height and 
the gaudy cabins of the floating palaces carried up and down the 
leaders of western and southern politics, business, and society. 
But it was bad doctrine after the railroad era gained its stride, 
and it became worse every day after the trunk line railroads 
reached Chicago. The South formed an opinion and then closed 
its mind. Its orators continued to talk of the dependence of the 
Ohio Valley on New Orleans, at a moment when the banks of New 
York were filled with the paper and securities of the Northwest. 
The panic of 1857 made the error worse, for the North and West 
were prostrate, while the South still had in cotton a source of un- 
touched prosperity. The grave analyses of southern writers, show- 
ing the panic to be due to a faulty economic organization of the 
rest of the Union, and the South to be impregnable in its economic 
situation, helped to confirm a general hope that the South could 
get along well alone and that the Northwest would ultimately 
follow it out of the Union. Wherefore, in part, secession; and a 
war that saved the Union, if it did not shape its future growth. 
It is easy after the event to show how southern mistake and 
faulty analysis failed to see the unifying of the North and West 
by the normal process of industrial growth. Every northwest 
State gave its vote to Lincoln in 1860. And after the election, 
instead of following the South into the Confederacy, the Ohio 
Valley sent its young men, by hundreds of thousands, into the 
Union armies. No State that had been in actual contact with free 
territory went with the Confederacy. In all the Border States, 
Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, the 
forces of Union were strong enough to offset the overtures of the 
South. It was not always easy to do this. West Virginia, as has 


THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR 483 


been shown, was wrenched away from Virginia by sheer force. 
Kentucky muttered and sent many men into the Confederate 
armies, although the State refrained from secession. In Missouri 
there was civil war, followed by guerrilla warfare in which both 
Union and Confederate forces were involved. The old lines of 
communication, that had run from north to south since the first 
settlement of the Mississippi Valley, gave way to new bonds be- 
tween East and West. When the South closed the Mississippi to 
commerce, the traffic of the upper valley hesitated for a few 
months and then found outlet eastward over the trunk line rail- 
roads; and the recovery of the Mississippi by Union forces in 1863 
failed to send it back. No inducement has since been found to 
divert the interior commerce from the railroads to which the South 
drove it, or to restore to the Mississippi its ancient prestige. 

Each of the sections inherited a part of the far frontier, when 
the split occurred, and on the border of the plains the farthest 
flung of the engagements of the Civil War took place. Nothing 
that occurred in the way of fighting west of the Mississippi had 
any bearing upon the outcome of the test of strength that was 
under way between Washington and Richmond, and that was 
working its way up the Cumberland and Tennessee towards the 
Chattanooga gateway to the Old South. But the frontier, with its 
sparse population, was disturbed by what small portion of the war 
it had and revealed something of its capacity for action and its in- 
capacity for sustained defense. 

The southwest extremity of the frontier battle line touched the 
Rio Grande at El Paso and then ran north with that river to the 
northern portion of New Mexico. Here Texas tried to establish a 
military frontier in 1861, and west of it the Confederacy hoped to 
acquire the wealth of the Mowry mines in the Santa Cruz Valley. 
Confederate forces under General Henry Hunter Sibley swept up 
the Rio Grande in the autumn of 1861, unimpeded by Federal 
defenders of the region. Some of the United States commanders 
had turned their posts and property over to the Confederacy. 
Colonel E. 5. Canby alone stuck to his post at Fort Craig, without 
yielding to, or retarding, the advance of Sibley. The Confederate 
army passed around him and went on up the river to Albuquerque 
and Santa Fé. 

A logical objective for Sibley was the new Colorado Territory 


1 Carl Russell Fish, ‘‘Economic Conditions in the Northwest, 1860-1870,’ in State 
Historical Society of Wisconsin Proceedings, 1907. 


484 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


to the north, which he might have reached through Las Vegas and 
over the Raton Pass. But in Colorado Governor William Gilpin 
was fearful of attack from the south and suspicious of alleged dis- 
union conspiracies among the southern members of his community. 
Without authority from Washington, or funds to pay them, Gilpin 
raised two volunteer regiments, which he marched south to the 
Santa Fé Trail and over it to relieve Canby. The Confederate 
offensive was checked south of Fort Union on the Santa Fé Trail, 
there was unimportant fighting between Fort Union and Albu- 
querque, and by April, 1862, the retreat of Sibley left the Rio 
Grande in Union hands. A few weeks later, reinforcements ar- 
rived from California, in the form of Colonel Carleton’s column 
that had advanced from Yuma through Tucson. Carleton was 
left in possession at Santa Fé, with men more interested in the new 
mines of Arizona than in their military problem. 

The Rio Grande episode took place in a country sparsely in- 
habited, where the few residents were indifferent to the struggle 
going on before them. The Mexicans of New Mexico were easy 
going and illiterate, and neither helped nor hindered either of the 
hostile forces. The Santa Fé Trail along which it occurred was 
itself some hundreds of miles in advance of the settled portion of 
either Union or Confederacy. | 

But near the eastern end of the Santa Fé Trail, where it left the 
Bend of the Missouri, there was fighting of a different sort, with a 
militant local population ready to take part at any moment. Here 
was Kansas, still sore from its own civil war of the preceding dec- 
ade. Here, too, was Missouri, with its policy as a State in bitter 
dispute, and with an antipathy to the “Jayhawkers” of Kansas, 
which it took no pains to disguise. Close by was Arkansas, sparsely 
settled, more primitive than either Missouri or Kansas, and full of 
partisans of the Confederacy. In these three States the sympa- 
thizers of both sides were already yearning to get at each others 
throats and needed only the call to arms in 1861 to set them loose. 

The result was guerrilla warfare and private violence. It is not 
possible to separate the events that may have had some military 
meaning from those that were only acts of revenge or private 
grudge. There were raids on both sides, and murder, theft, and 
arson. Bands of ruffians held together for considerable periods 
with no other purpose than that of plunder. The military com- 
manders of the Union forces, with their headquarters at Fort 
Leavenworth, had generally no definite enemy to confront, but 


THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR 485 


were at their wits’ end to keep the civilian population from destroy- 
ing itself. The term “border ruffians” had been used in the days 
of the Kansas war to describe the gangs of southern sympathizers 
who ravaged the Kansas settlements; it continued to be used 
throughout the Civil War. 

In August, 1862, one of the guerrilla leaders, Quantrill by name, 
led his band to Lawrence, Kansas, in the most famous of the 
border raids.? The town was surprised, and sacked without resist- 
ance. When the enraged population in return sought to harry the 
Missouri border, General J. M. Schofield, who had been unable to 
protect them, restrained them from doing damage. In the follow- 
ing year a Missouri expedition was organized in Arkansas and 
fought its way through southwest Missouri to Kansas City and 
Westport before it was broken up. The border warfare was at all 
times a vexatious and useless waste, revealing more of the passions 
of the border people than of the military problems of the Union. 

In addition to the border raids, the Confederacy has been 
‘charged with the promotion of Indian uprisings. The Indians of 
the plains became generally uneasy in the sixties, after a decade of 
relative tranquillity in the fifties, and this change has been as- 
cribed to Confederate policy. No important evidence has been 
brought forward to confirm this. Only in the Indian Country im- 
mediately west of Arkansas did events clearly conform to such a 
policy; and here with reason, for the Confederacy included this 
portion of the Indian Country within its limits. There was a Con- 
federate Indian Office that extended control over these tribes, sub- 
stituting itself for the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. It 
drove out the Union Indian agents, compelling the tribes to enter 
into new agreements with their new sovereign. In the long run its 
activities were useless to the Confederacy and disastrous to the 
tribes, for the United States regarded this defection, though under 
compulsion, as treason. After the Civil War was over, the Five 
Civilized Tribes were punished by a confiscation of the western 
half of their ranges; and the lands so acquired were used for the re- 
colonization of various tribes that were taken off the plains. But 
it was easy to assert that whenever unusual disorder appeared 
among the Indians, the Confederacy was responsible for it. 

The earliest of the serious Indian disorders of the Civil War oc- 
curred on August 18, 1862, when the Sioux of Minnesota, led by 
Little Crow, ravaged the valley of the Minnesota River, and 

2 William E. Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars (1910). 


486 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


slaughtered some hundreds of its unsuspecting inhabitants.* The 
blow came at a moment when the Union was in despair, and Lee 
was contemplating his first invasion of the North. Pope had suc- 
ceeded McClellan, only to be outgeneraled by Lee at the second 
battle of Bull Run. The outlook in Europe was black. It was hard 
to avoid the suspicion that the desolate frontier above New Ulm, 
and the exiled survivors who rushed in panic to that village and 
Fort Ridgely, were consequences of the military measures of the 
Confederacy. The Secretary of the Interior thought so; and 
whether they were or not, the whole Minnesota frontier west of 
St. Paul, and extending to the Yellow Medicine River, was aflame 
with murder. 

But the records of the Indian Office show other and sufficient 
causes and make it unnecessary to turn to the theory of Con- 
federate intrigue. The Indian agents in Minnesota knew what 
was wrong, and had for a decade, since the Ramsey treaties of 
1851, been protesting against the abuse of the Sioux bands by 
Congress and the Senate. The latter body had, in its full power 
over treaties, amended part of the promised reserve out of exist- 
ence. The former had been overdeliberate in appropriating the 
treaty funds. And when the money came at last, long after the 
preémptioners had swarmed over the ceded lands, the accumu- 
lated traders’ claims against individual Indians ate up the pay- 
ment and left little for distribution. 

The result of the slow and partial compliance of the United 
States with the agreement signed by the tribal leaders in 1851, was 
to split the Sioux into two factions: the “farmers” and the “blan- 
kets.”’ The former, in what was typical Indian fashion, accepted 
the inevitable and made the best of it. They settled down to farm 
life on the limited reserve, took care of their crops and live stock, 
and the men generally symbolized their transition from the wild 
to the tamer state, by putting on trousers like the white man. The 
blanket Indians, on the other hand, remained irreconcilable. The 
young braves who had not come to realize the power of the su- 
perior civilization, and the untamed, and the malevolent, and the 
indolent, accepted the annuity goods as they came around; but 
accepted them with surly demeanor, and despised the more com- 


3 Isaac V. D. Heard, History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863 (1863); the 
local historians have difficulty in agreeing upon the total loss. Heard placed it at 737, 
but more recently it falls to 490 in the well-checked lists of M. P. Satterlee, 4 Detailed 
Account of the Massacre by the Dakota Indians of Minnesota in 1862 (1923). 


THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR 487 


pliant tribesmen who put aside the blanket and went to work. 
The agents saw trouble coming many years before it arrived. The 
sense of grievance soaked in, and it called for no more than a 
chance accident to provoke an outbreak. 

Such an accident occurred in Meeker County, in the broad 
angle between the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers, on 
August 17, 1862, when five white settlers were murdered. No one 
has suggested that the affair was premeditated, but once it was 
done, the guilty Indians and their innocent friends realized that 
punishment was almost certain to follow and to hit them without 
discrimination. They therefore struck first, blanket and farmer 
Indians alike, ravaging the frontier for two hundred miles and 
seizing women and children as captives and hostages. For a few 
days the braves remained in the vicinity of the settlements around 
and above New Ulm; then they took to flight up the Minnesota 
River towards the unsettled country beyond the Yellow Medicine. 

By the end of August the pursuit was under way, with the 
- Minnesota militia led by the officers of the young State. Appeal 
was made to the United States Government, and General Pope, 
no longer useful in the East after the second battle of Bull Run, 
was sent out to take command. They followed the tribes and the 
prisoners up the river, afraid always that the Indians would add 
to their outrage by further mutilation and murder of the women 
and children. In September they caught up with them and de- 
feated them in battle. Little Crow and the more guilty leaders 
fled from the field and took refuge among relatives in Dakota 
Territory. The so-called “friendly ’’ Sioux remained to surrender, 
and to return the prisoners to Henry Hastings Sibley who com- 
manded the militia. “‘ The Sioux war is at an end,”’ Pope declared 
in October, but as the women and girls came home and told the 
story of their captivity the whole Northwest was swept with a 
demand for the extermination of the Sioux. 

The Government was in a dilemma. Viewed as a war, the Sioux 
prisoners had done only what Indians nearly always did when the 
tribes went to war, and the United States had insisted upon han- 
dling them with treaties and calling them nations. The prisoners 
were entitled to protection, and an occasional voice from the 
frontier, like that of Bishop Henry B. Whipple, called attention to 
the repeated provocations the savages had received. But the 
opinion of the border called the prisoners murderers and demanded 
revenge. Several hundreds of the Sioux were tried by military 


488 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


commission at Fort Snelling, and found guilty of murder, rape, 
and arson. Mobs of citizens from St. Paul tried to take the matter 
of punishment into their own hands, and for some days maintained 
a state of siege around the fort. In the end President Lincoln 
pardoned all but thirty-eight of the savages, but these were 
hanged on a single scaffold at Mankato on December 26, 1862. 
The rest of the Sioux prisoners were soon transported to a Dakota 
reservation; the fugitives were pursued and scattered by troops 
under Pope’s orders. The Minnesota outbreak was a natural 
consequence of a faulty system of Indian administration, made 
worse by the pressure of an active frontier. This pressure kept up 
and was injuriously felt wherever the use of the trails and the ex- 
tension of the mining camps brought groups of white men into 
contact with the Indian tribes. 

The Colorado problem arose when the fifty-niners rushed to the 
camps of the Pike’s Peak Country and intruded upon the range 
assigned in the treaty of 1851 to the Arapahoe and Cheyenne. ‘This 
tribe, at Fort Laramie, agreed that its country lay between the 
Platte and the Arkansas, and east of the divide. Living was easy 
here, for across the range the buffalo herd drifted north every 
spring, and south in the autumn. With even the primitive bow 
and arrow, the Indians could extract a livelihood from the herd; 
and as they acquired more horses and firearms, the buffalo became 
their basis of existence. The natural tendency of the travel along 
the trails to Oregon and Santa Fé was to break up their herd and 
waste the game, but the huge numbers of buffalo seemed to defy 
extinction as long as no regular settlements were made within the 
Arapahoe and Cheyenne country. The growth of Denver and the 
formation of the new territory forced a revision of the plans under 
which the Arapahoe and Cheyenne had lived in peace since the 
Treaty of Fort Laramie. While Congress was engaged in the final 
debates over Colorado Territory in 1861, the Indian agent at Fort 
Wise negotiated a treaty with the tribes concerned. He summoned 
the Indians to his Upper Arkansas Agency, on the river near the 
point where the trail to Santa Fé turned southwest along the line 
of the Purgatory or Las Animas River. Here was one of the several 
sites of Bent’s Fort; and here there had been traders’ stations of 
some sort, with little break since the country was visited by Zebu- 
lon Montgomery Pike, in 1806. 

The first concentration of the wild tribes of the plains was ac- 
complished in the Treaty of Fort Wise. North of the Platte, the 


THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR 489 


Sioux still remained at large on the open range; south of the Ar- 
kansas, the Kiowa and Comanche retained their freedom, although 
the agents were asking for a means of restraining them. But be- 
tween the two rivers, the Arapahoe and Cheyenne now accepted as 
their definite home a triangular tract in southwestern Colorado in 
the angle of Big Sandy Creek and the Arkansas, and about ninety 
miles in breadth. Fort Lyon, near the junction of the streams, be- 
came their new agency, and the tribes ceded to the United States 
the rest of the range, outside the reserve, although retaining the 
right to hunt over it until it should be further disposed of. 

The Sand Creek Reserve was never a success. It comprised 
perhaps the most dry and desolate region of the whole Arapahoe 
and Cheyenne country, and had no special virtue except that none 
of the more important routes of travel actually traversed it. The 
Indians never lived here, but remained in wandering camps, be- 
coming more sullen and despondent as they watched the heavy 
traffic over the main stage line to the north and the spread of iso- 
lated farms where there was enough water to maintain a little 
stock. There was slight trouble, however, until the summer of 
1864, when, by premeditation, the stage line was attacked along 
most of its length from Fort Kearney to Denver. 

Governor Evans, of Colorado, saw the uprising coming in the 
early summer, when immigrants reported on the sullenness of the 
tribes, and the necessity for strict military organization west of 
Fort Kearney. There was further testimony to it in sporadic at- 
tacks upon isolated farming families, so many indeed that towards 
the end of June he sent a proclamation to the friendly Indians, 
warning them to collect around the agencies to avoid “being killed 
by mistake.” Four concentration posts were named in the mes- 
sage: Fort Larned, in central Kansas, for the Kiowa and Co- 
manche; Fort Lyon, on the Sand Creek Reserve, for the southern 
bands of Arapahoe and Cheyenne; Camp Collins, in northeast 
Colorado, for the northern bands; and Fort Laramie for the Sioux. 
He promised rations and protection for the friendly bands that 
might assemble here; and destruction for the wild bands that re- 
mained on the warpath. It was after this warning, and in spite of 
it, that Ben Holladay’s stage line was broken up. There were 
Indian attacks at nearly every station, haystacks and buildings 
were burned, and stock was driven away. Few lives were lost, but 
damage to property and nerve was considerable; and as late as 
September one of the Indian agents wrote that, “Communication 


490 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


with the Missouri river is now almost entirely cut off. All coaches 
are provided with a large escort, and the trains crossing the plains 
collect and travel together for protection.” 

There was no response to Governor Evans’s invitation to the 
bands to gather round the agencies until the summer came to an 
end, and autumn frosts lessened the comfort of life on the open 
plains. Then the Arapahoe and Cheyenne began to drift in to Fort 
Lyon, declaring that they were friendly and had always been so. 
The agent here took a party of them to Denver, late in September, 
for conference with Governor Evans and Colonel Chivington who 
was in command of the Colorado militia. This was an embarrass- 
ment to the authorities who were now ready for a campaign against 
them. Chivington received, on the day of the conference, a tele- 
gram from General 8S. R. Curtis who commanded the military de- 
partment, saying, “I want no peace till the Indians suffer more.” 
The Governor accordingly promised them nothing, lectured them 
severely, and sent them back to make what peace they could with 
the military authorities in the field. None the less, the bands con- 
tinued to gather around Fort Lyon and were directed by the 
agents there to go into camp on Sandy Creek, a few miles above 
the station. Among them was Black Kettle, leading chief of the 
Arapahoe and Cheyenne, who declared his friendship, sought relief, 
and joined the camp. 

Colonel Chivington completed his preparations for a campaign, 
organizing some nine hundred men in two militia regiments. He 
marched them in November, not out on the plains where there 
were still some warlike bands at work, but down the Arkansas to 
Fort Lyon, where the tribes had been invited to assemble, and 
where they were now peaceably in camp. From Fort Lyon he 
marched up Sandy Creek to the camp, which he attacked without 
warning, killing indiscriminately braves, squaws, and children. 
He justified the attack by declaring that in the wigwams his men 
found numbers of fresh white scalps and fragments of mutilated 
bodies. His men retaliated in kind. with mutilation and slaughter. 
He and his authorities ealled it a punitive campaign. The Com- 
missioner of Indian Affairs described it as a massacre, in which 
Black Kettle’s people were “‘butchered in cold blood by troops in 
the service of the United States.”’ It has never been possible to fix 
the responsibility with satisfying accuracy, for many of the braves 
professing peace were actually fresh from the warpath; but the 
episode, as clearly as that in Minnesota two years earlier, pointed 


THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR 491 


to the impossibility of leaving Indian relationships upon their old 
basis much longer. 

After the Chivington massacre, the Arapahoe and Cheyenne 
bands took to the plains again, until in October, 1865, a new treaty 
was made with them on the Little Arkansas, near Wichita. They 
surrendered the Sand Creek Reserve, accepting the promise of a 
new one on the Cimarron River, partly in Kansas and partly in 
lands confiscated from the Cherokee. But the Senate never con- 
firmed this, and until 1867 the Arapahoe and Cheyenne remained 
a tribe without a home. 

The Sioux of the plains, who had restricted themselves at the 
Fort Laramie conference to the range north of the Platte, re- 
mained at peace through the fifties in spite of the fact that the 
Senate had cut down the promised annuities by seventy per cent. 
They were not encroached upon by settlers during the decade, nor 
by miners except at the end of the period. The camps established 
in the Bitter Root Valley, and along the heads of the Missouri 
_ River in 1862 and immediately thereafter, raised new problems of 
transportation, but did not crowd actual settlers up against the 
Indian hunting grounds. Like the Arapahoe and Cheyenne, the 
Sioux of the plains lived the wild life, dependent chiefly upon game 
for food and clothing. 

Among the stipulations of the Fort Laramie Treaty (which 
never had the force of law, because never fully ratified), was one 
that bound the Sioux to permit the free opening of wagon roads, 
and the unmolested passage of emigrants along them. Any dam- 
age done to emigrants was to be paid for out of annuity funds. In 
1854 a minor episode occurred that revealed something of the 
problem. It centered around a stray cow, abandoned by a Mormon 
train on the Platte. This animal, sick and emaciated, was killed 
and eaten by a Sioux band; whereupon other Sioux, perhaps 
through virtue, or because they had not been numbered at the 
feast, carried the news to the agent at Fort Laramie that a cow 
had been stolen. The agent, instead of charging the animal against 
the next annuity, or dismissing the case because the owner had 
not complained, reported to the military commander at the post, 
and he dispatched a punitive party commanded by a young lieu- 
tefiant, Grattan by name, to arrest the thieves. Through some 
mishap the party was taken as a war party, and the Sioux attacked 
and wiped out the detachment. The next summer a regiment was 
marched upon the plains to discipline the offenders, and Fort 


492 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Pierre was later taken over as an army post on the Missouri River. 
There was no organized resistance, and the punishment was pro- 
miscuous, with every probability that whatever Indians had in- 
curred real guilt were out of reach.* 

It was not until 1865 that the Sioux of the plains became un- 
manageable. Orders were sent from Washington that year to sur- 
vey a new wagon road cut-off to the mines of western Montana 
Territory. It was to leave the main trail near Fort Laramie, pro- 
ceed northerly down the Powder River, east of the Big Horn 
Range, and then bend west to the Yellowstone River and the 
Bozeman mines. ‘This was the Bozeman Trail, and might have be- 
come an important emigrant road had not the Sioux, and their 
determined chief, Red Cloud, sternly prohibited it. The survey 
party of 1865, under General P. E. Connor, marched down the 
route, to the Rosebud River, returning in the autumn in what 
can only be regarded as a careful retreat. They found Indians 
hostile, and ready to pick off stragglers or stampede stock. This 
was the heart of the buffalo range, and Red Cloud declined to 
consider its surrender. 

In 1866 Colonel H. B. Carrington was sent out from Fort 
Kearney to mark the road, protect emigrants and build a chain of 
posts from Fort Laramie to Bozeman.’ He built Fort Phil Kearny 
at the point where his road left the Powder River, and Fort C. F. 
Smith at the crossing of the Big Horn. But his force was so small 
that after separating the construction parties and the garrisons, 
he was compelled to hold the defensive in a hostile country, where 
the defensive was interpreted by the Sioux as a confession of weak- 
ness. His men were inadequately armed, with left-over rifles from 
the Civil War; whereas the Indian Office was yearly issuing to the 
Indians, rifles of recent manufacture and superior accuracy. 

As Carrington settled into. winter quarters, his orders to the 
posts and men under him were peremptory; to remain on the de- 
fensive, to fight only when attacked, and then to do no more than 
was necessary to insure safety. He repeated his directions more 
than once, for his men were restive under inaction, and many of 
the younger officers hungered for engagements and promotion. 
On December 21, 1866, his wood-cutting train signaled back to 


4 The industrious and romantic Cyrus Townsend Brady has Indian Fights and Fighters: 
The Soldier and the Sioux (1904), and Northwestern Fights and Fighters (1910). 

5 Grace Raymond Hebard and E. A. Brininstool, The Bozeman Trail (1922), relates the 
story of the episode, and contains admirable maps. 


THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR 493 


headquarters at Fort Phil Kearny, that they were surrounded by 
attacking Sioux. There had been more than one fight of this 
character before; and Carrington sent an expedition to relieve and 
bring in the train. Before these started, under Fetterman, a new 
officer of his command, he repeated his admonitions against taking 
an aggressive. The troops dashed out of the fort, passed over a 
low range of hills and disappeared forever. When they failed to 
come back, further relief was sent, which found the dead and 
mutilated bodies of every man in Fetterman’s command. The 
evidence showed that upon leaving the post they had seen Indians 
and had pursued them instead of continuing upon their mission; 
and the Indians had led them into a successful ambush. 

The Civil War was over before the Fetterman massacre oc- 
curred, and the conditions that were so often ascribed to Con- 
federate intrigue continued although the Confederacy had become 
a thing of the past. The army of the United States was commanded 
by men who had seen long service in real war, and in the War 
_ Department there were resources that overshadowed the scanty 
numbers of Indians and their limited equipment. Yet there was 
no peace on the plains. There was instead, as the confusion of the 
war passed away, and the United States could see it better, a crisis 
in Indian affairs caused by pressure from all sides, and increasing 
penetration of their ranges. There was as well the question 
whether the Bureau of Indian Affairs was adequate for its task, 
and whether the ideals of an army were the proper ones to domi- 
nate the men who were charged with the policing of the plains. It 
was a crisis that could end only in the extinction of the tribes, 
should events continue as they were. And the administrative 
system could not be altered for the better unless the United States 
should rise to new levels of organization and better standards of 
government, 


CHAPTER LI 
THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD 


Ir there had been no other reason why the Indian policy must pro- 
ceed upon a new course after the Civil War there would still have 
been cause enough for the change in the fact that the Pacific rail- 
road was becoming a reality, and that from either side of the Con- 
tinental Divide a railroad track was piercing the plains and moun- 
tains. It had been long in starting. As late as 1848, the New York 
Herald, that knew enough to know better, avowed in seriousness 
that “‘This whole project is ridiculous and absurd. Centuries 
hence it will be time enough to talk of such a railroad.” During 
the delay, the plains had become an open book, traversed in every 
direction and mapped and described from every angle. The emi- 
grants had continued to march across the continent in unbroken 
procession and with them the stage lines and the freighters had 
served to establish the routes and emphasize their length. The 
delay was long enough for the builders to learn how to construct 
so great a work, and for Congress to devise the means of aid. The 
“centuries hence”’ were reduced to decades, when the passage of 
the Union Pacific Act of 1862 opened the period of actual con- 
struction. 

The national assistance offered the road in the original act 
seemed to be generous. The ten sections of public lands and the 
loan of sixteen thousand dollars of United States bonds per mile, 
would begin to accrue as soon as the first brief division of forty 
miles was completed and accepted by the federal inspectors. These 
could then be marketed, in order to provide funds for constructing 
additional divisions. ‘The promoters of the company were required 
to raise only a small initial capital, to build the opening divisions 
and cover the necessary overhead. But even this small amount 
proved to be beyond their capacity, for the Civil War was calling 
for great loans to the Government, and was providing abundant 
outlets for the investment of free capital. Persons with money to 
invest found better opportunities at home in every section of the 
Union than were afforded by the stocks of a railroad on the plains. 
Even the warmest advocates of the Pacific railroad had not con- 
vinced themselves that the road would pay. It was to be a na- 


THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD 495 


tional enterprise justified by the intangibles of national pride and 
protection. There might be a profit for the actual builders, but 
little was expected from operation. Hence the stock found no 
market, and there could be no more bonds except as a second 
mortgage. The United States loan was to be a first mortgage upon 
the property. Only an over-hopeful speculator could believe that 
the railroad would earn enough to satisfy the interest charges of 
this mortgage, to meet the charges on a second mortgage, and 
leave a surplus for dividends upon its stock. 

The Central Pacific ef California accepted the terms of the act 
of 1862 and proceeded with its surveys, while the new Union 
_ Pacific corporation was organized as provided in the act. But 
neither company showed vitality for five years, and the road that 
was urged so strongly as a war measure was hardly begun until 
the war was over. Ground was broken at Sacramento for the 
Central Pacific, in February, 1863, and a few miles were running 
before the end of the year. By the end of 1865 there seem to have 
been about sixty miles in operation, thirty more in 1866, and forty~ 
six more the following year, making a total of 136 miles at the be- 
ginning of the building season of 1868. The construction was hin- 
dered by lack of capital, and the extreme difficulty of the engineer- 
ing problem in the Sierra; but the Union Pacific that had only the 
gentle rolling plains to cross built even fewer miles, forty in fact, 
by the end of 1865. 

Congress revised the enabling act in 1864, taking into account 
the lack of confidence in the future of the road, and the way in 
which its first mortgage obstructed further loans. The most im- 
portant changes in the law were the doubling of the land grant, 
which now became twenty sections per mile of track, and the shift- 
ing of the Government loan to the status of a second mortgage. 
The railroads were permitted to borrow on first mortgage bonds 
to the amount of the Government loan. Investors who had no 
interest in second mortgage bonds or stock felt differently about 
a first mortgage, substantially guaranteed by the Government's 
holding of a second mortgage of the same amount. It was already 
required that the roads should have a standard gauge of four feet, 
eight and one half inches, so as to permit the exchange of rolling 
stock with the larger railroad systems of the East. 

Under the law of 1864 both companies found financial support 
and gained momentum. Their speed was further increased by a 
law of 1866 concerning the junction point at which they should 


496 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


meet. The original act provided that the Central Pacific should 
build within the State of California and meet the Union Pacific on 
the eastern border of that State. In the law of 1864, the Central 
Pacific was given permission to build 150 miles into the State of 
Nevada; and about this time President Lincoln made an executive 
ruling that gave a new aspect to construction in Nevada and 
Utah. The original law provided that the loan of bonds by the 
United States should be at the rate of sixteen thousand dollars per 
mile; with the proviso that this should be doubled in the rough 
foothills, and trebled to forty-eight thousand dollars in the heavy 
mountains. It was left to the President to determine the points 
at which the double and treble subsidies should begin to accumu- 
late. His ruling threw the relatively flat country of the high Ne- 
vada plateau into the mountainous class, and both of the com- 
panies made a rush for the privilege of constructing here. The 
Central Pacific watched every move of Congress, with a careful 
lobby, and saw that no law was passed unless it received some 
favor. In 1866, it induced Congress to repeal the junction point 
and permit each road to build what it could, and to make a junc- 
tion where the tracks should happen to meet. 

Then began the race of construction, with the bond loan as the 
prize for performance. At the moment when the Arapahoe and 
Cheyenne and the Sioux were beginning their forlorn struggle 
against compression and extinction, the railroads increased the 
size of their gangs upon the plains, and in 1867, 1868, and 1869 
built as never before. For a period of sixteen months in 1868 and 
1869 every working day saw an average of two and a half miles of 
new track laid down. And in the spring of 1869 the work was 
done, 638 miles by the Central Pacific, and 1038 by the Union 
Pacific to the junction point. 

The incidents of construction were so picturesque as to receive 
more general attention than was usually accorded railroad building 
now that the novelty of it had worn off. The material difficulties 
of the builders were great. From both ends they were building 
into an unoccupied waste, where they must carry with them their 
gangs, their habitations, and everything their men might need 
except fresh meat. With every mile laid down, the work became 
more complex, for over the increasing length of track must move 
from the first day not only the building materials but the equip- 
ment for daily life of large communities, and the communities 
themselves. 


THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD 497 


The terminal towns early caught the attention of the visitors 
upon the roads. During the busy seasons the railroad camp might 
easily run to ten thousand men, for all of whom shelter must be 
provided. The mining camps had taught them how to do this. The 
men slept in tents or wood frames covered with canvas or rough 
wood shacks. Along the disreputable street deep with dust or mud 
in the center and flanked by the hitching rails for horses, were the 
stores and houses. Their wooden fronts ascending to a parapet 
above the roof made an ambitious showing that was often belied 
by their canvas backs. Saloons, dance halls, and gambling dens 
were innumerable. After work there was nothing to do but wait 
for to-morrow, and while away the time with the parasites who 
swarmed along the line. “Hell on Wheels”’ was the appropriate 
name that Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican bestowed 
upon the town he visited in 1868. ‘‘Hell would appear to have 
been raked to furnish them,” he said, “and to it they must have 
naturally returned after graduating here.” 

The towns were temporary, yet none was so forlorn that some 
speculators did not appear to hope that it would be permanent. 
As soon as the site was selected, a town would be platted, streets 
named for the heroes of the Civil War, and lots put on sale. Among 
the forms of gambling that flourished was the speculation in real 
estate; and after each town moved on, leaving its empty shell be- 
hind it, it left also a harvest of blasted hopes. 

Out of these railroad towns the construction trains proceeded 
every morning, carrying the whole working population to the job. 
It was not always a safe task. On the Union Pacific there was con- 
tinuous friction with the Indians whose range was invaded. The 
meat hunters had constant trouble and sometimes gangs of work- 
men were attacked, so they were sent to their tasks armed to 
resist. From the chief engineer, General Grenville M. Dodge, 
down to the section hands, many of the builders were men of 
military experience. Soldiers discharged from the army in 1865 
and 1866 sought work with the railroad. They “stacked their 
arms on the dump and were ready at a moment’s warning to fall 
in and fight,” said Dodge. They could arm a thousand men from 
the track train, experienced soldiers commanded by seasoned 
officers. And after the day’s construction work, thus guarded, the 
trains carried them back to the shacks at night. 

Every so often, when the track head was forty or fifty miles in 
advance of the terminal town, they knocked off work for a day 


498 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


and moved the town. Tents were taken down, bags and boxes 
were packed, frames of houses were disjointed, and piled in rough 
mass upon the cars. The whole moved forward to a new place at 
the head of the track. An observer at the site that was to be 
Cheyenne, has reported the arrival of the train at that bare sta- 
tion: “The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on 
the platform, called out with a flourish, ‘Gentlemen, here’s Jules- 
burg.’”? And what had been Julesburg that morning was taken off 
the cars and set up to be Cheyenne that night. The terminal town 
of the Central Pacific was a Chinese camp, for Governor Stanford 
and his associates had repaired their local labor shortage by im- 
porting cheap coolie gangs. It was less expensive and more orderly 
than the Union Pacific camp, for the Chinese workers saved their 
pay, lived on rice, and wasted less than the Irish laborers who 
dominated on the eastern end. 

The engineering problems varied on the different ends of the 
line. At neither base was there access to a stock of supplies. San 
Francisco Bay was remote from places of manufacture, with the 
result that all the heavy tools, the rails, and the rolling stock came 
by ocean route, with heavy freights and long delays. At the east- 
ern end of the line, there was no railroad connection when con- 
struction began. St. Joseph was a railroad terminus, but no line 
crossed Iowa as yet to Council Bluffs, which was selected as the 
starting-point. The supplies were freighted up the Missouri from 
St. Joseph or St. Louis, or from places more remote. The Union 
Pacific was burdened with the unnecessary condition that it should 
begin not at the Missouri River but at the western boundary of 
the State of Iowa. This was a provision offered to their constitu- 
ents by the Iowa delegation and meant that a long and costly 
bridge must be built across the Missouri River before the railroad 
itself could get far under way. Most of the American railroads 
were still crossing important rivers on car ferries, for the manu- 
facture of steel was not yet far enough advanced to make the steel 
truss bridge practicable; and there was no satisfactory substitute 
for it. The western road had an abundance of wood and stone in 
its vicinity with which to do the heavy work of construction, but 
the eastern road ran through a treeless plain, with long stretches 
where neither of these essential building materials was at hand. 
Neither of the tracks was held down by the engineers to a standard 
maximum gradient, but both were built along the natural con- 
figuration of the country unless the ascents were prohibitive. 


THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD 499 


In spite of the generous aid offered by the United States in the 
act of 1864, both roads found it hard to raise money as needed to 
pay the costs of construction. In both cases the same men who 
controlled the stock of the company organized and controlled as 
well contracting companies to which were let contracts for con- 
struction of the line. In this way they expected to get their profits 
out of the speculation. On the western end it was the firm of 
Charles C. Crocker and Company that had the lion’s share of 
business; on the eastern, it was the Crédit Mobilier of America. 

The Crédit Mobilier of America was a Pennsylvania corpora- 
tion, created by special legislative act. It was organized with 
general powers, but without special purpose, except that its pro- 
moters proposed to sell their charter to some group of speculators 
who needed corporate privilege without running the gauntlet of 
legislation to get it: The Union Pacific men soon gained control of 
it, and through it the road was built. A Congressional committee 
later reported that the Union Pacific had cost about fifty million 
dollars to build, and that the railroad paid the builders this price 
and an additional profit of about twenty-three million dollars. 

The procedure was to let the contract for a given section at a 
stated price, and to pay the builders partly in cash, of which the 
railroad had little, and more in the securities it could control. It 
possessed under the law common stock, first mortgage bonds, and 
the United States bonds which constituted the second mortgage. 
All of these fluctuated on the market, so that it is almost impos- 
sible to say with precision what the cost of any transaction came 
to. Mr. James Ford Rhodes, who is familiar with business prac- 
tices of the period after the Civil War, and who has made a careful 
study of the Crédit Mobilier, has reached the conclusion that in the 
year 1868, the largest year of the Crédit Mobilier, the holder of a 
share of stock in the company received as dividends: 


230 per cent first mortgage bonds 
515 per cent Union Pacific stock 
60 per cent cash 


All of the securities were far below par, the Union Pacific stock 
running as low as nineteen cents on the dollar, but Mr. Rhodes’s 
computation is that the holder of a $100 share of Crédit Mobilier 
stock received in 1868 dividends worth $341.85; and it is his judg- 
ment that the profit was not excessive considering the short life 
of the investment and its risk. 


500 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


The profits would probably not have attracted attention had 
not one of the promoters, Oakes Ames, a Massachusetts congress- 
man, sold blocks of this stock to his colleagues, lending them the 
money with which to pay for it until the dividends should earn the 
cost. The New York Sun brought out the facts of this scandal 
during the presidential campaign of 1872, showing that a long list 
of Congressmen and other public officers had accepted these doubt- 
ful profits from a company that existed only because of acts of 
Congress. The Crédit Mobilier case became the text for innumera- 
ble sermons on political reform, while Oakes Ames, exposed and 
censured, died broken by the blow. It was only by such heroic 
finance that the Union Pacific was able to meet its bills during the 
years of actual construction. 

The race for mileage was begun after the legislation of 1866, and 
during the next two years the two great lines were brought within 
sight of completion. But as the year 1868 progressed there arose 
a doubt as to whether the advancing ends would ever meet. The 
law did not say where that point should be, or require the roads to 
build along a common survey. Each chose its own route, and a 
prospect arose of two overlapping lines, each continuing indefi- 
nitely. Congress intervened at this stage, and fixed upon the north 
shore of the Great Salt Lake where the junction should be made. 

At Promontory Point in Utah, or rather at a point directly 
north of its base, the last spike was driven May 10, 1869. Sidney 
Dillon, president of the Union Pacific, drove it in the presence of 
officers and guests from both coasts, while throughout the United 
States bells were rung, meetings were held, and orators called at- 
tention to the meaning of the event. Among the many poets of the 
day, Bret Harte stood out with his much quoted verse: 

“What was it the Engines said, 
Pilots touching, head to head 
Facing on a single track, 


Half a world behind each back?” 


He let the eastern engine get the worst of the argument, and per- 
mitted the West, which he, beyond most writers of the day could 
understand, to carry off the honors: 


*“*You brag of the East! You do? 
Why, I bring the East to you! 
All the Orient, all Cathay, 
Find through me the shortest way; 
And the sun you follow here 
Rises in my hemisphere.’” 


THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD 501 


Never again could the wild Indians range the plains from the 
Rio Grande to the Assiniboin. The Pacific railroad split the 
northern and southern plains forever. It destroyed the possibility 
of the wild life as a permanent condition. The year after the cele- 
bration at Promontory Point, the section of the Union Pacific that 
crossed the plains was paralleled from Denver to the Missouri 
River by the. Kansas Pacific Railroad, which was connected with 
the main line at Cheyenne. The Kansas and Nebraska towns 
threaded upon these railroad lines, pushed out into the Indian 
Country, and their people gave words and definiteness to the de- 
mand that there must be a new chapter, and a final one, in the 
history of the American Indian.! 

1J. P. Davis, History of the Union Pacific Railway (1894), was long the standard 


secondary work. ‘There now are admirable accounts in Nelson Trottman, History of 
the Union Pacific. A Financial and Economic Survey (1923). 


CHAPTER LIT 
THE DISRUPTION OF THE TRIBES 


By 1869, almost an even century after the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 
it had become impossible to treat the Indians as separate inde- 
pendent tribes without doing violence to the facts of their life or to 
the reasonable demands of civilization for the use of the land over 
which they hunted. The theory of the Fort Stanwix Treaty was 
obsolete, as was that upon which Monroe and his successors acted 
after 1825. There could not be an Indian civilization maintained 
in its original form by the legislative enactment of the white race. 
If the Indian could not put his land to use, another would. In the 
process of experience by which this fact was learned the Indian 
tribes declined in civilization and took on the worst attributes of 
the stronger race. The benevolent theorists, who desired to pro- 
tect the tribes from actual destruction, were in the older com- 
munities of the East. On the frontier, in actual contact with them, 
lived aggressive men who were realists in life, and saw in the 
Indians an incumbrance upon the earth. Only an absolute des- 
potism, with high ideals and a powerful machinery of government 
could have saved the tribes, and this did not exist in the United 
States. It is not necessary or fair to call the process A Century of 
Dishonor (1881), as Helen Hunt Jackson did in her literary in- 
dictment of our Indian policy, for the only conscious policy of the 
Government was honorable and generous. But the American 
machine was far from being exact or competent; and through the 
different agencies at play, the defects of legislation and adminis- 
tration, and the incompetence of the Indians themselves, a result 
was attained after a century of American independence that was 
not far different from what a policy of conscious dishonor might 
have brought about. 

In advance of the completion of the Union Pacific, Congress was 
stirred by the manifest uneasiness of the Indians and the loud 
recriminations of the frontier States and Territories, to undertake 
an investigation of the status of the border. The Minnesota out- 
break attracted attention after a long period in which the relations 
were relatively peaceful. The Chivington massacre kept interest 
alive and raised more doubts as to whether all the right was on 


THE DISRUPTION OF THE TRIBES 503 


one side. The Fetterman affair at Fort Phil Kearney was quite as 
glaring. The points of view from which the long chain of events 
was to be examined were displayed and argued in the reports of the 
Government bureaus concerned and in the press. 

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had been a part of the In- 
terior Department since 1849, was under grave suspicion of incom- 
petence and corruption. There was not always a pretense of mak- 
ing appointments of agents or other officials on the basis of fitness. 
Like the rest of the civilian establishment of the United States, it 
was riddled with the spoils system. On the accession of a new 
President, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs expected to be re- 
moved to make room for a friend of some friend of the President. 
The new incumbent proceeded to assign his patronage where it 
would do the most good in a political way; with the frequent result 
that the Indian wards of the United States were placed in the 
charge of incompetents, perhaps even drunkards or crooks. At best 
they could become useful only after years of service at the expense 
of their charges; but by the time they had learned enough to cease 
to be a liability on the system, their terms of office came to an end 
with a new election. It is to the credit of human nature that as 
many of them were honest and conscientious as were, but the 
natural result of the system was to defeat whatever good intention 
Congress had in its legislation. One case taken at random illus- 
trates what often happened. The agent of the Yankton Sioux in 
1863 was like his associates charged with agency supplies which he 
was supposed to issue for consumption as needed. He appears 
from the testimony taken by the committee that investigated his 
conduct to have required his Indians, who could not read or 
write, to make their mark early in the fiscal year upon vouchers 
covering his whole stock. He then issued what he must and sold 
the rest to his own profit. It was common to find cases in which 
flour, bacon, and other supplies for Indian consumption were de- 
livered spoiled, yet paid for in full. There was often collusion be- 
tween agents and contractors. 

The defects of the Indian administration were damaging, but 
the virtues were almost as embarrassing. The good agent became 
at once the friend of his tribe and took their point of view. He 
trusted them beyond warrant and saw clearly their necessity to 
have weapons of the most improved character in order to fight 
evenly the lessening game. He kept on issuing rifles and ammuni- 
tion to them up to the verge of outbreaks, and more than once the 


504 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


army was sent to repress tribal troubles hot upon the issue of 
Indians’ rifles more modern than the troops themselves carried. 
Naturally the army that was always sent for to restore peace was 
indignant at the agents who were so often immoral, corrupt, and 
injudicious. 
| But the army was itself under suspicion nearly as grave. Its 
members had no responsibility except when there was trouble 
afoot. The officers were generally good men, for the spoils system 
did not permeate the military establishment, and there was a 
pride of service that kept most officers free from the abuses to 
which agents yielded. But the army was a fighting machine, 
whereas the Indians needed an effective police. Congress failed to 
provide a system of law to cover Indian affairs, and crimes in the 
Indian Country had no adequate means of detection or punish- 
ment. There was only the martial law, which treated the Indians 
as enemies rather than as petty criminals or drunken murderers. 
When, as in Minnesota in 1862, a local affair took place, the tribes 
knew that the punishment would be sweeping and fall alike upon 
the innocent and the guilty. There was an incentive for the good 
Indians to join the bad and for both to take captives with whose 
bodies they might barter for better terms. The tribes so often 
were willing to give up members guilty of murder or robbery as to 
justify a belief that a system of police, manned perhaps by the 
Indians themselves under white officers, would have been able to 
maintain order at less cost of life and money. The Fetterman 
massacre appears to have been caused less by Indian hostility, 
than by martial spirit in officers who ought to have approached 
their task as policemen. At Sand Creek in 1864 the congregated 
Indians bore testimony to the fact that peace might have been 
established by negotiation, and that the martial arder of Colonel 
Chivington was itself one of the obstructions to peace and good 
understanding. | 

Mutual recrimination between the army and the Indian service 
could not, however, solve the problem, and Congress was inspired 
by the Chivington affair to create a Committee on the Condition 
of the Indian Tribes which began its work in March, 1865. Its 
members, in various groups, visited the scenes of trouble, taking 
testimony as they went, which they published in an illuminating 
Report in January, 1867. They reached without difficulty the con- 
clusion that the principle of permitting the Indians to exist as 
roving tribes was no longer tenable. They could not agree upon 


THE DISRUPTION OF THE TRIBES 505 


the measure of guilt to be ascribed to the various parties to the 
special outrages they investigated, but they saw the poverty and 
homelessness of the once wild tribes, and the impossibility of main- 
taining peace without giving them better security and support. 
While they investigated, the engineers put through the Union 
Pacific, and it became more imperative to quiet the plains, so that 
the trains might run without interruption. The way in which 
Black Kettle’s warriors had extinguished the Holladay stage line 
in 1864 was a valuable object lesson. 

As a result of the Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes 
(1867), Congress created a peace commission in the summer of 
1867, with instructions to restore peace on the plains, to secure an 
unimpeded right of way for the railroad, and to recommend a per- 
manent policy for dealing with the Indians. Two years later a 
volunteer and non-political Board of Indian Commissioners was 
organized as a permanent adjunct to the Bureau, to advise the 
Commissioner and oversee his contracts and finances. Peace was 
brought about, although not without difficulties that further 
illustrate the conflict between the civilian and military methods of 
approach. 

The northern Indians were invited to meet the peace commis- 
sion at Fort Laramie in September, 1867, and runners were sent 
upon the plains to carry the summons to the dispersed bands. But 
when the commission arrived at the scene of the council the Indi- 
ans were not there. Instead of coming to confer, Red Cloud of the 
Sioux sent in word that peace would recur when the United States 
formally abandoned its attempt to build the Powder River road 
and withdrew the garrisons. Only after six months’ delay was the 
council held in April, 1868; and in the resulting treaty the road 
was given up, while the Sioux accepted as a permanent reserve the 
southwest corner of Dakota, west of the Missouri River, and 
guaranteed in return peaceful transit on the plains. Other treaties 
were made with the Ute, Shoshoni, and Bannock tribes across the 
divide, whereby these Indians withdrew to condensed areas. Con- 
gress, that summer, created Wyoming Territory, and completed 
the political organization of the West. 

The tribes of the southern plains were induced to meet the peace 
commission, in October, 1867, on Medicine Creek, eighty miles 
south of the Arkansas. The braves of the Kiowa, Comanche, and 
Apache were there, as well as the Arapahoe and Cheyenne who 
were still vagrant and homeless after the Fort Wise Treaty of 1866. 


506 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


These last had had one more intimidating lesson as to the difficulty 


of doing business with the army. 

In the spring of 1867 General Winfield S. Hancock, who had 
been assigned to command the army on the plains, made a demon- 
stration of American power along the Arkansas. He took the local 
agents with him, and had a fully equipped army, with infantry, 
cavalry, artillery, and a pontoon train, and proposed to warn the 
tribes to keep away from the trails to the Southwest. In March he 
was at Fort Larned, where the Pawnee Fork comes in from the 
west to join the Arkansas. Here he decided to visit in force the 
Arapahoe and Cheyenne village, then encamped on the Pawnee 
Fork, about thirty-five miles away from the Santa Fé road. The 
Indians objected to this, and the agents protested, but Hancock 
persisted. As he approached, the population of the camp took to 
flight, leaving their tents and belongings behind them, and the 
tribe gave their visitor the cold welcome of a deserted village. He 
destroyed their property, treating flight as a hostile action and 
proceeded in imposing state to Fort Dodge, on the Arkansas, near 
the crossing of the one hundredth meridian. The peace commis- 
sion had this to overcome before they could persuade the Indians 
to gather on Medicine Lodge Creek for the October conference. 
Here, the Kiowa and Comanche surrendered their claims in the 
panhandle of Texas and accepted part of the confiscated lands in 
Indian Territory between the Red River and the Washita; while 
the Arapahoe and Cheyenne were placed in the Cherokee outlet, 
between the Arkansas and the Cimarron. 

With the conclusion of the treaties that guaranteed free pas- 
sage for the railroad the trouble was not yet over. There was 
peace for the moment, and the Indian agents, with incorrigible 
confidence, issued to the tribes the special gifts that Congress 
made available in 1868. During the periods of declared war the 
ration issue had of course been stopped, and the Indians were re- 
duced to destitution. Arms and supplies were issued to the Ara- 
pahoe and Cheyenne in July and August, 1868. Almost immedi- 
ately sporadic murders of settlers took place in Kansas along the 
western margin of the settlements on the Solomon and Saline forks 
of the Kansas River. The young braves, at least, were on the war- 
path again, and General Sheridan, who had replaced Hancock, 
undertook to restore order by an attack upon the base from which 
they operated. Most of the Indians were in the west end of the 
“ndian Territory, south of the outbreaks. Camp Supply was 


THE DISRUPTION OF THE TRIBES 507 


newly built on the North Fork of the Canadian, and toward this 
post in the autumn several columns of troops advanced from New 
Mexico, from Fort Lyon in Colorado, and south from Fort Hays 
in central Kansas. Major-General George A. Custer, with the 
Fifth Cavalry, U.S.A., led this last detachment. The peaceful 
Indians had been ordered to congregate at Fort Cobb, under 
General Hazen, for protection and rations; and the hostiles had 
been advised to keep away. 

Black Kettle none the less came in to Fort Cobb toward the 
end of November, claiming to be at peace. Hazen refused to re- 
ceive him, ordering him away from the fort. The Indians pitched 
their tents on the Washita, toward which place Custer headed 
his advance. The punitive column had crossed from Fort Hays to 
Camp Supply in November; it left the latter place November 23, 
marching heavily through the snow. On November 27 it surprised 
and completely destroyed Black Kettle’s village, killing without 
discrimination braves, women, and children. Custer’s battle on 
the Washita was not a war, but a punishment, for the period of 
possible Indian wars was over. The tribes were now so widely scat- 
tered, and so poor, and the railroads made mobilization of military 
forces so easy, that the rest of the Indian story is one of localized 
disturbance and overwhelming retribution. In 1876 Custer him- 
self was the victim of his gallantry and the system. 

The northern Sioux, whose affairs occasioned this catastrophe, 
settled down after 1868 upon their reserve in Dakota, with the 
Missouri River on their east, the open Powder River range upon 
their west, and the Black Hills in the center of their territory. The 
encroachment that they sought to avoid in this reserve, came none 
the less. By 1872 the Northern Pacific Railroad reached the Mis- 
sourl River at the Mandan village. Worse than that, gold was 
found in their Black Hills, and increasing rumors of the wealth of 
the find came out. In 1874 Custer was sent into the Black Hills to 
ascertain the extent of the discoveries and the degree of penetra- 
tion by white prospectors. Disturbed by the threats of dislodg- 
ment involved in this, the Sioux were further irritated by the 
dishonesty of the agents at Red Cloud’s agency. A group of 
geologists, on an exploring trip from Yale University, turned their 
attention from rocks and fossils to flour and bacon, in 1874, and 
charged over signatures of honor and distinction that the agency 
affairs were a disgrace.! Nothing happened to the agent, however, 


1 Professor O. C. Marsh, A Statement of Affairs at the Red Cloud Agency, made to the Prest- 
dent of the United States (1875). 


508 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


and by the autumn of 1875 the various Sioux bands were dispersed 
over the plains, all disgruntled, and the young braves menacing. 

In the winter of 1875 the Sioux were ordered in to the agency 
on pain of being treated as hostile, and when they failed to obey, 
three columns of troops were sent out to round them up in 1876. 
Custer commanded one of these, and pursued his charges into a 
destructive ambush. He and his men were slain June 25, 1876, 
under conditions that make it clear that he behaved more coura- 
geously than wisely, but that make it clearer that the army was at 
a disadvantage in policing Indians. 

In the summer of 1877 there was an outbreak among the Nez 
Percés, equally illustrative of the hard lot of the Indians and the 
inadequacy of the machinery for handling them. The Nez Percés, 
whose habitat was the Snake Valley, were notably upstanding, 
honest, and friendly Indians. The first blow to their friendship 
was in 1862 when the town of Lewiston was planted in the heart of 
a reserve that had been guaranteed them in 1855. The next year a 
treaty was negotiated, by which the Clearwater country was made 
available for white entry, but many of the Nez Percé braves re- 
fused to be bound by it because they had not personally given it 
their assent. The Indians never reached a point at which they 
recognized a tribal government competent to bind by its action all 
the members of the tribe. Chief Joseph, the leader of the non- 
signatory Nez Percés, kept his followers under control, but they 
lived where they pleased in the country that the treaty had pre- 
tended to transfer. Attempts were made by President Grant to 
bring Chief Joseph toterms, the Secretary of the Interior, Zachariah 
Chandler, being sent on mission to him in 1876; but Joseph re- 
mained moderate and firm in his refusal. The next year a casual 
brawl gave occasion for punishment, and the Nez Percés fled from 
the Snake Valley. General O. O. Howard led in the pursuit, gain- 
ing every day a higher respect for the character and capacity of 
his opponent.? The fugitive Indians did no damage as they went, 
and even paid the frightened farmers for the supplies they took. 
Howard failed to catch them, though he followed them across 
Idaho and Wyoming into Montana for seventy-five days. On the 
Missouri River they were at last maneuvered into the grasp of 


? Brig.-Gen. O. O. Howard, Nez Percé Joseph. An Account of his Ancestors, his Lands, his 
Confederates, his Enemies, his Murders, his War, his Pursi:it and Capture (1881); Nelson 
A. Miles, Serving the Republic. Memoirs of the Civil and Military Life of Nelson A, Miles, 
Lieutenant-General, United States Army (1911), 


THE DISRUPTION OF THE TRIBES 509 


another military force, commanded by Nelson A. Miles. After 
every outbreak, whatever the cause, there were further cessions, 
and increased consolidation of the tribes, as well as increased in- 
ability to break out again. 

The changing Indian problem, after the completion of the Union 
Pacific, gradually induced changing methods. In 1871 Congress 
put an end to one of the vicious details of the system by abolishing 
the treaty. From the first treaty made by Congress at Fort Stan- 
wix in 1784, down to 1871, 370 treaties were concluded and ratified. 
In all of these the form of negotiation with an independent nation 
had been observed, and the Senate had confirmed by the constitu- 
tional approval of two thirds. The fact that the Indians could not 
comprehend the full meaning of a treaty and lacked the institu- 
tions for enforcing one, was not the primary reason for abolishing 
this method of negotiation. ‘The moving condition now was the 
jealousy of the House for the Senate. The treaty method gave to 
the Senate legislative power over a domestic problem; and the 
House that was expected to pay the bills demanded that it be con- 
sulted in the agreement. In the Indian Appropriation Bill of 1871 
it was provided that no future agreements should be made without 
the approval of Congress. 

With the exception of occasional local outbreaks, the tribal re- 
lations were generally peaceful after 1871. For this, the Indian 
Commissioner claimed the credit. The Board of Indian Commis- 
sioners claimed credit, too, and in their annual reports pointed out 
how their wisdom and disinterested moderation gradually diverted 
the tribes from the road to war to the paths toward peace. The 
real reason is to be found in the closing of the open frontier; but 
the change was not the less genuine, whatever the cause. 

“The Indian Service is primarily educational,’ declared the 
Commissioner of Indian Affairs in his Annual Report for 1909, 
after a generation of the changed conditions.* His conclusion is 
borne out by the testimony of the intervening reports, since the 
last of the tribes were placed upon reduced reserves. While the 
Indians were wild and roved the plains, the educational work 
possible among them was limited. The religious denominations 
conducted missions, but the influences toward civilization were 


' 3W. J. Harsha, “Law for the Indian,” in North American Review, 1882. Indian Com- 
missioners have had a habit of writing of their duties; George W. Manypenny, Our Indian 
Wards (1880); Francis E. Leupp, The Indian and his Problem (1910); Charles L. Slattery, 
Felix Reville Brunot, 1820-1898 (1901). 


510 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


offset by the lure of the tepee and the irresponsibility of wild life. 
The mission schools, however, showed that the Indian children 
were capable of education, and reservation day schools were 
multiplied as the tribes became more constant in their residence.* 

The educational task of moulding the child who returned at 
night to the home of savage parents was too great not to arouse 
complaint. The agency boarding school was the response, and 
parents were persuaded to entrust their children to white teachers, 
among whom they lived during the impressionable years of their 
lives. But institutional schools, at best, were dehumanized; and at 
worst their personnel was that of the rest of the Indian service, 
political and incompetent. The Commissioner under President 
Hayes did much to remedy this, and pointed out that there ought 
to be a merit system for appointments. Not until the Civil Service 
Act was passed in 1883 was there statutory authority for removing 
these places from the reach of the spoilsmen, but before this time 
a third type of school had been devised, in the non-resident board- 
ing school. 

In 1879 a young officer named Pratt received permission to 
assemble a group of boys and girls from various border tribes in the 
old Carlisle Barracks, in Pennsylvania, there to educate them. 
He opened the school that fall, installing a trade-school education 
and sending the students in the summer vacations to live and 
work with selected families of the neighborhood. Here they 
learned the white man’s standard of life, acquired his tastes, and 
formed relations of mutual respect with the people whom they 
met. For nearly forty years the Carlisle school was a model that 
was imitated by some thirty other non-resident boarding schools. 
Carlisle was closed down in 1918, when the army needed the plant 
for invalid rehabilitation, and when the progress of citizenship 
among the tribes had again. changed the nature of the Indian 
problem. 

Long before the tribes were condensed upon reserves, it was 
foreseen that the Indian could not be civilized and enabled to cope 
with individualistic neighbors until the communal influences of 
the tribe could be broken down. As early as 1817 one of the 
treaties with the Cherokee provided that an individual Indian 
might at his request be separated from the tribe and acquire 
citizenship. But the courts ruled that citizenship was not their 


‘Martha L. Edwards, “‘A Problem of Church and State in the Eighteen-Seventies,”’ in 
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. x1. 


ee 


THE DISRUPTION OF THE TRIBES 511 


inherent right, and that even the Fourteenth Amendment to the 
Constitution did not confer citizenship upon them when it asserted 
that “‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States and 
subject to the jurisdiction thereof”’ should be citizens of both the 
nation and the State of their residence. The Commissioners of 
Indian Affairs therefore urged continually upon Congress a policy 
that would break up the tribal autonomy and throw the Indians 
upon their own exertions. 

A great advance in the theory of dealing with Indian wards was 
made under President Hayes, whose Commissioner E. A. Hayt in- 
stalled a modified merit system. It was time for this, for in the 
previous administration it was shown that the trader at Fort Sill 
was paying annually for his appointment, and Grant’s Secretary 
of War was receiving the money. Hayt recommended sweeping 
changes in his first’ Annual Report: the concentration of the tribes 
should continue until complete, education should be pushed, ra- 
tions should be reduced as rapidly as possible to encourage indi- 
vidual responsibility, a special code of reservation law should be 
passed, a system of Indian police should be set up, and, chiefly, 
tribal holding of land should give way to ownership of land in 
severalty. 

Congress moved slowly along the path indicated by Hayt and 
his successors. In 1887, in the Dawes Act, it laid down a general 
principle for dividing up the lands. ‘The tribes were to be allowed 
to grant fixed areas to all their members, and to sell to the United 
States whatever there remained above the amount required for 
this. The proceeds of the sale of the surplus were to constitute a 
tribal trust fund, administered for their interests by the United 
States, which was also to act as guardian for the Indians to whom 
land in severalty was granted. These wards were not to be allowed 
to sell their lands or to dispose freely of them until such time as 
they appeared to have sufficient sense of responsibility to warrant 
it. There was a real danger that the Indians would not appreciate 
the significance of private lands, and would barter them away at 
once and become dependents upon the Government without 
either tribe or land. As rapidly as the individual owners received 
their certificates of competency, they were to become full citizens 
of the United States. The treatment of the Five Civilized Tribes 
was different in detail from that of the other wilder Indians, but 
the principle of steering all of them toward full citizenship with its 
privileges and responsibilities was now established. In 1906, in the 


512 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER © 


Burke Act, further safeguards were provided for Indians who were 
still incompetent to protect themselves, and further discretionary 
authority for the Commissioner in granting them citizenship. The 
lands bought by the United States in the execution of the policy 
of severalty were turned into the public domain and opened to 
entry under the general laws. This brought about in most in- 
stances only a moderate addition to the area of agricultural de- 
velopment; in the Indian Territory it provided a tract for which 
no government existed until in 1890 Congress established there 
the Territory of Oklahoma. 

Long before the Burke Act was passed, or Oklahoma was ready 
for statehood in 1907, the Indian problem had lost its larger mean- 
ing, and the Indians had come to be one of the lesser difficulties in 
the road to Americanization. The undigested alien groups of the 
large cities, and the status of the negro in an industrial world, had 
far greater bearing upon national welfare. The Indians were no 
longer a military risk, and the scores of army posts that dotted the 
West with reason and propriety in the decades of Indian wars lost 
their significance. In place of Indians and wild game, the vast 
distances of the old range had come to breed great railroad systems 
and to be the propagating ground of social panaceas. This was the 
last American frontier, yet it was true to precedent in regarding 
its immediate needs as universal in character, and in demanding 
that the whole attention of the United States be devoted to their 
solution. 





CHAPTER LIV 
THE PANIC OF 1873 


Tue last phase of the history of the American frontier runs from 
the building of the Union Pacific until the frontier disappeared. 
This covers less than twenty-five years in time; in place its setting 
is the high plains, which the explorers first described at the open- 
ing of the century. The process was different from that with which 
any earlier frontier was opened up, for now the railroads were not 
only bringing settlers to every entrance around the margin, but 
were penetrating every remote oasis that blossomed in the heart of 
the Far West. Events moved more rapidly than had been possible 
in earlier migrations; yet the process would have been completed a 
decade sooner, had it not been impeded by the great depression 
that followed the Civil War. The panic of 1873 produced a de- 
spondent state of mind that induced eastern intellectuals like 
Godkin, Lowell, and the clientele of the Atlantic Monthly to despair 
of the future of America. It angered the West, slowed its develop- 
ment, and gave rise to great movements of reform. 

It would be possible to write an economic history of the North 
and West that would show a rapid growth unhindered by the Civil 
War. The panic of 1857 had run its course by 1861, and the 
United States was ready to enter upon an era of industrial develop- 
ment. The losses had been written off and new capital had been 
accumulated. In spite of the war the new era opened. From 1861 
to 1865 there was a stimulated prosperity due to the war demand 
for manufactured commodities. The cities grew in size and 
number, improving their plants each year. Profitable farming was 
pushed north and west, and new railroads were worked in to com- 
plete the existing system. In spite of the capital drawn off for war 
purposes, there was money for investment in every sort of busi- 
ness. Immigration in the ten years of the sixties brought into the 
country nearly as many persons (2,500,000) as were enrolled in all 
the Union armies. 

The western aspect of this period of investment and boom had 
for its chief feature the building of railroads, with the Union and 
Central Pacific system as the most spectacular single item. When 
this was chartered in 1862, after long agitation, and as a war 


514 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


measure, there was no call for more than one main line, and no ex- 
cuse for another. South of Iowa the Confederacy was so strong as 
to preclude the development of a Missouri or a southern railroad. 
North of Council Bluffs the settled frontier was still so far east of 
the Missouri River that no one could have justified an additional 
road at that moment. But with the advance of years the regional 
ambitions that impeded the Pacific railroad in the fifties came 
again to life; and after 1865 the southern aspirations, with north- 
ern backing, could again be presented to Congress. Regardless of 
their probable profits, more roads had to be chartered, and more 
lands dedicated to their use. 

On July 1, 1864, Congress chartered a second land-grant conti- 
nental railroad, the Northern Pacific. The route was Whitney’s 
and then Stevens’s. The gentle slopes on either side the divide, 
and the narrow space of useless mountains along this route at- 
tracted the attention of all of its surveyors. Stevens believed it 
was the best of all despite the adverse ruling of his chief, Jefferson 
Davis. The one most difficult stretch, from the mouth of the 
Yellowstone to that of the Snake, was colonized by the Montana 
and Idaho miners at the moment when the Union Pacific received 
its grant. From these camps arose demand for a second line, with 
one Josiah Perham at its head, advocating a ‘‘People’s Pacific 
Railroad Compeny.” 

The organic act of the Northern Pacific called for a railroad 
from the head of Lake Superior to Puget Sound, and provided for 
it the usual right of way through the public domain. The land 
grant was the most generous yet allowed, comprising twenty sec- 
tions per mile in the States traversed (which would be Minnesota 
and perhaps Oregon), and forty in the territories. There was no 
loan of bonds such as had accompanied the Union Pacific, for 
Congress had already repented of this form of railroad encourage- 
ment. 

The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad was chartered two years 
later, July 27, 1866, to build along the line of the thirty-fifth paral- 
Jel survey. There was already one of the Missouri railroads built 
southwest from St. Louis to Springfield, and its terminus was ac- 
cepted as the starting-point for the Atlantic and Pacific. West of 
springfield the project showed the line running across Indian 


1 Louis H. Haney, Congressional History of Railways (1908-1910), is highly factual, but 
contains an accurate digest of materials on the governmental side of the land grants. It 
originated in two Bulletins, Nos. 211 and 342, of the University of Wisconsin. 


THE PANIC OF 1873 515 


Territory and northern Texas, through Albuquerque on the Rio 
Grande, and across the Colorado River at the Needles into Cali- 
fornia. The land grant was like that of the Northern Pacific, and 
there were no bonds. There was a significant proviso, secured by 
the watchful efforts of the California railroad men, which author- 
ized a California road, the Southern Pacific, to build a line of its 
_own to join the Atlantic and Pacific on the eastern border of the 
State, and to receive the same land-grant as the invading road. 

The Texas Pacific Railroad was authorized March 3, 1871. Its 
eastern end was fixed near the head of navigation of the Red River, 
at Marshall, Texas. From Marshall there were promising eastern 
connections through Shreveport to New Orleans, and through 
Texarkana to St. Louis. West of Marshall the project passed 
through Fort Worth, crossing Texas on its longest diameter, to El 
Paso, whence it followed the thirty-second parallel survey to Fort 
Yuma and San Diego. It received what was now the usual grant 
of twenty and forty sections, and no bonds. But its grant was less 
important than it would have been had the United States pos- 
sessed any land within the State of Texas to be granted. The 
Texas lands were retained by Texas when that republic abandoned 
its independence to enter the United States. Its legislature was 
willing to help the through railroads, and eventually the people of 
Texas had to face a railroad question not unlike that which the 
United States finally confronted. But neither the Atlantic and 
Pacific nor the Texas Pacific could receive anything in Texas from 
the United States. 

The Texas Pacific was the fourth and last of the land-grant con- 
tinental railroads. Before 1871 the slow construction of the roads 
across the plains suggested questions of policy, and raised doubts 
as to the wisdom of such lavish subsidies. The period inaugurated 
with Douglas’s Illinois Central grant in 1850 came now to an end. 
Until 1862 all of the grants were made through the State Govern- 
ments to the railroads in question; after that year some of them 
accrued directly to the railroads. The continental lines, conceived 
as such, were only four, although other lines that eventually 
crossed the plains were put together out of smaller roads. The 
local roads of the Mississippi Valley continued to receive land- 
grants up to the very end of the period, which at least one states- 
man of national importance had reason to regret. It was almost 
impossible for members of Congress to keep clear of the specula- 
tive interests that desired the lands. In the Crédit Mobilier ex- 


516 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


posure it was revealed how many of them were willing to take an 
unearned profit.? In 1869 the Speaker himself, James G. Blaine, 
helped one of the lesser lines, the Little Rock and Fort Smith, to 
save its privilege, and then begged for financial advantages be- 
cause of his services. Whatever usefulness was in the land-grant 
policy at its inception was outlived in the twenty-one years before 
it was abandoned in 1871. 

The Union and Central Pacific interests were lukewarm at the 
thought of additional Pacific railroads in a country where there 
was hardly business for a single line. The financial difficulties that 
the first of the continental roads had to confront, and that delayed 
completion for seven years after chartering, were monumental for 
the new roads. None of these had United States bonds to use, and 
none found private capital eager to take the risk. The Northern 
Pacific and the Atlantic and Pacific were chartered well ahead of 
1869, but the Union Pacific was opened that summer, and there 
was yet no prospect that a rival road would be begun. Railroad 
development was being pushed within the States, and across the 
central plains, by men who were mostly deaf to the grandiose 
schemes of additional continental lines. | 

The Denver and Rio Grande, and the Atchison, Topeka, and 
Santa Fé were perhaps the most notable of the more regional lines 
that developed during the later sixties, the latter having the ad- 
vantage of a grant made to the State of Kansas in 1863. The 
former was the work of a group of Philadelphia promoters, headed 
by General William J. Palmer who took up his residence south of 
Denver at a place soon known as Colorado Springs. The town of 
Denver made a connection with the Union Pacific at Cheyenne 
in June, 1870, and the following summer General Palmer broke 
ground for his ambitious scheme to capture the Santa Fé trade for 
Colorado merchants. By the summer of 1872 they were running 
the road one hundred and twenty miles, to the Arkansas at Pueblo, 
and were faced by a temptation to change their program. A little 
above Pueblo the Arkansas emerges from a deep gash in the Rocky 
Mountains, known as the Royal Gorge. Through this ravine it 
was possible to get a railroad, and only one, to western Colorado 
and eventually to Salt Lake City. The Denver and Rio Grande 
would have appropriated the route without a question had its 
ambitions not been SOR ASs by the Atchison, Topeka, and 
Santa Fé. 

3 J. B. Crawford, Crédit Mobilter of America. Its Origin and History (1880). 


THE PANIC OF 1873 517 


The Atchison, as this road was often called in its early years, 
was designed to follow the Santa Fé Trail from the Missouri River. 
Atchison, on the west bank opposite St. Joseph, was a natural 
starting-point, and before the end of 1872 the railroad built the 
whole Jength of Kansas and earned its land-grant. Outside Kan- 
sas, 1t was on its own resources, and was divided in interest be- 
tween Santa Fé and Salt Lake City. As it ascended the Arkansas, 
-and the Denver road approached that river from the north, there 
was a competition between the two roads that extended from their 
financial offices to the construction gangs that finally fought with 
picks and crowbars over the possession of the narrow gorge above 
Pueblo. The quarrel was smoothed out in the next decade, but the 
two lines gained much advertising from it. 

The railroad mileage of the United States increased from 
30,635 as reported in the Census of 1860, to 52,914 in 1870, and 
92,296 in 1880. In spite of generous land-grants the financial pro- 
blems remained severe, and the least promising roads paid the 
highest interest charges and developed the most slowly. The 
Northern Pacific completed a paper organization immediately 
after its incorporation, but was five years in finding a financial 
backer. In 1869, under the inspiring leadership of Jay Cooke, it 
came to life. 

The name of Jay Cooke of Philadelphia was one to conjure 
with in 1865.3 Coming to Philadelphia as a banker on the eve of 
the Civil War, he was then unknown and unimportant. He ac- 
quired standing through selling on profitable terms a block of 
Pennsylvania war securities that was rated unsaleable by older 
and more seasoned bankers. He completed the transaction 
through enthusiasm and patriotism, and sold the securities to 
doubting investors on the argument that whether they paid or 
not, the sale of the securities was indispensable to the preservation 
of the Union. There was as yet no general public market for in- 
vestment securities, most of the new issues having to find their 
takers among the banks and brokers and men of large means. 
Cooke added to his enthusiasm and patriotic determination to 
help win the war, a belief that in nearly every American family 
there was a small nest egg of real money. Often this was held out 
of circulation; and the notion that it was hidden in an old stocking 
under the feather bed was not far from the fact. Much of it was 


3 Ellis P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War (1907), is not only invaluable 
at this point, but is one of the frankest of our biographies of commercial magnates. 


518 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


available on notes signed by borrowers of the neighborhood, for 
every region had its local men of means who lent at usurious rates, 
bought tax titles, and acquired property below its worth at fore- 
closure sales. Cooke’s contribution to American finance was in the 
discovery that there was a potential investing public, of great 
numbers and considerable means; and that the problem was how 
to acquire the confidence of the common people who owned the 
money. 

From his success with Pennsylvania bonds, Cooke progressed 
at once to the sale of United States bonds, gaining immediate 
fame. Repeatedly, as Secretary of the Treasury Chase called for 
bids for issues of the bonds that he was required to place in over- 
whelming issues, Cooke was the banker who bid highest for them, 
and secured the contract. His defeated rivals attacked him for 
alleged collusion with the Treasury; but when the tests of their 
charges came at the next offering, it was Cooke who bid the high- 
est, on the lowest allowance for handling. More than once he took 
issues for which the trade would not bid at all, until at last he be- 
came the unofficial agent of the Treasury for floating loans. 

He found the ultimate buyers among the common people. His 
methods of advertising the loans included propaganda through the 
press, dodgers given out at the post offices, and advertisements in 
the local and religious weeklies that found their way into the care- 
ful families who had gold and needed to be assured that it was safe 
to let it go. He was never too busy in his Philadelphia office to 
receive in person the country buyer of a single bond, to accept the 
payment, and to give his word that the United States would pay. 
He also combed Europe for buyers, and when the English and 
French bankers preferred to put their faith in securities of the 
Confederate States, he took his samples to the Germans, Dutch, 
and Swiss, who bought heavily at the market price. How much 
he did to win the war can only be a matter of guesswork; but when 
it was over, his name stood out at the head of the list of American 
financiers. 

His credit was impregnable. He had promised that the country 
would pay, and it did. Every buyer who bought bonds below par 
through him, paying in greenbacks that were even further below 
par, thought well of the investment. The United States paid 
interest charges in gold. After the war the market price of the 
bonds rose rapidly, at a time when the buying power of the dollar 
was increasing. The investments made through Cooke were so 





THE PANIC OF 1873 519 


profitable that he found himself with enhanced repute, and with a 
iarge class of devoted customers who looked to him to keep them 
provided with sound investments. There were no more bonds of 
the Government to sell, and he turned necessarily to railroad and 
manufacturing bonds, disposing of them readily in the booming 
years of business that followed the surrender of Lee in 1865. 
In 1869 Jay Cooke became convinced that the statements of 
_ Josiah Perham and Isaac Stevens were true, and that the northern 
strip of territory across the United States needed only a railroad 
to enable it to develop into a prosperous farming country. Michi- 
gan and Wisconsin were already booming, and the timber million- 
aires who appeared out of their northern woods gave a foundation 
for encouragement. The Wisconsin railroads were pushing to- 
wards St. Paul, which was to be brought into communication with 
Chicago in 1872. Beyond St. Paul was the long wagon trail of the 
Red River ox-carts, over which the annual supplies of the Cana- 
dian Northwest had been hauled for many years. It was suspected 
that wheat could be grown to advantage in the valley of the Red 
River of the North once an outlet to a market was provided for it. 
It was the belief of many that the Canadian Northwest itself was 
attached to the British Empire by the slightest thread, and that 
its real destiny was with the United States. 

Jay Cooke accordingly became the financial underwriter of the 
Northern Pacific Railroad in 1869, and acquired the determining 
influence upon its destiny. He selected as its point of departure 
the head of Lake Superior, which he had himself visited in 1868. 
He bought heavily in lands around Duluth, to take advantage of 
the increment in values when the railroad should become a fact, 
and he gained control over the Lake Superior and Mississippi 
River Railroad, already building between St. Paul and Duluth. 
From a point on this line, near Duluth, he commenced actual con- 
struction for the Northern Pacific early in 1870. He was already 
singing the praises of the investment to prospective buyers of the 
stock and land. 

For the next two seasons the Northern Pacific built steadily 
through the untouched Indian country, winding its way among 
the lakes of northern Minnesota. It crossed the Mississippi River 
at Brainerd, and reached the Red River at Fargo; thence it pushed 
on, almost due west to the Missouri River which it reached in 
1873 at a point opposite the Mandan Village where Lewis and 
Clark wintered in 1804-1805. It was appropriate in 1873 to call 


520 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


this new station Bismarck. The ultimate destination was the 
Columbia River. For the present Cooke gave up the idea of build- 
ing across Washington Territory to Puget Sound, contenting him- 
self with procuring a control of the Oregon Steam Navigation 
Company which maintained an adequate system of river steamers 
on the Columbia below the junction of the Snake, and with which 
it did not seem profitable to offer railroad competition. 

There is no room to doubt the sincerity of Cooke in promoting 
the Northern Pacific, despite the fact that there was no traffic to 
justify the regular running of trains over the 471 miles of track be- 
tween Bismarck and St. Paul. He believed in it with the same 
enthusiasm that had marked his confidence in the United States; 
and sold the securities at home and abroad to investors who ac- 
cepted his word. But he hypnotized himself. His prospectus was 
as much too hopeful as the early estimates of Lewis and Clark 
were too pessimistic of the future of the plains. It was not, after 
all, a part of the Garden of Eden that he was tapping; nor could 
the drifting snows of winter be made to yield to any persuasive 
language of the prospectus writer. Yet he not only sold the stock, 
but bought it, to the exasperation of his partners who did not be- 
lieve as wholly in it as he did. During 1872 he found it necessary 
to buy increasing amounts himself in order to provide funds in 
accordance with the terms of his underwriting. 

The boom of the later sixties reached its crest not far from the 
date when Cooke underwrote the Northern Pacific. Since 1861 the 
United States had been spending, investing, and destroying 
property without check. The agricultural extension of the decade, 
as usual, was on credit, and covered the farms with a blanket of 
debts. The purchases of farm implements were a new source of 
demand for farming capital. The railroads represented a drain 
upon the accumulated savings of some one; and those lines that 
were not immediately revenue-producing effected an absolute 
withdrawal from use of the capital involved. The Civil War was 
fought. No one dares say how much it cost, for no accounting 
system can cover all its charges. But for a period of four years 
nearly two and one half million men were withdrawn from pro- 
ductive work — and were devoted to the labors of destruction. 
The South was left flat and bankrupt, with its whole pre-war 
movable wealth to be replaced. In spite of the heavy increase in 
productivity, and the accumulations of new capital, the American 
people developed new demands for wealth more rapidly than they 


THE PANIC OF 1873 _ 521 


saved it. In the early seventies they reached a stage in which the 
process of railroad building and other investment could continue 
only if money could be obtained abroad on reasonable terms. The 
further west one went in the United States, the completer the 
blanket of debt and the more universal the debtor status. What 
was typical of the West was universal in the South. 

In the winter of 1872-1873 the European market ceased to 
_ absorb enough American securities to enable American develop- 
ment to proceed without a check. Local crop failures in Europe 
produced a cessation of investment, and American scandals gave 
the United States a bad name. The Tweed ring exposure in New 
York City was disheartening. General John C. Frémont was Jailed 
in France under charge of promoting the European sale of bonds 
in a “land-grant” railroad that had not received its land-grant. 
The Crédit Mobilier scandal exploded in September, 1872. Cooke 
nevertheless was willing to do himself what he invited his custom- 
ers todo. He bought Northern Pacific until his solvency depended 
upon a market that he could not revive. On September 18, 1873, 
his partners closed the doors, and admitted bankruptcy, with the 
Northern Pacific as the chief contributing factor. 

It was, of course, more than the Northern Pacific, for the de- 
pression was everywhere, and for ten days panic was so wild upon 
the New York Stock Exchange that the governors of that clearing 
house closed it down and refused to allow sales to go to record. 
When they reopened at the end of the month, the crisis was a 
thing of the past; but so was the period of prosperity that had 
been ushered in with the outbreak of the Civil War. For the next 
five years the development of the plains was postponed. The con- 
struction gangs were disbanded, for there was no money to meet 
the pay roll or to buy the iron. The hard times induced a period of 
reflection and gave rise to frontier demands for legislative relief, 
such as had followed the earlier panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857. 
The complete absorption of the frontier was postponed another 
decade. 


CHAPTER LV 
FRONTIER PANACEAS 


THERE were two general conditions that prevailed over the West 
when the panic of 1873 occurred. One was the debtor status; the 
other was the intensified dependence upon markets for prosperity, 
and upon railroad transportation to reach the market. Each of 
these was so general as to bring the frontier population, or the near 
frontier population, into close accord. And when the depression be- 
came acute this accord was translated into political manifestations, 
much as the banking theory had become political in the Jackson 
period, and the Mississippi Valley aspirations in the early years of 
the Republic. Elsewhere throughout the Union were large num- 
bers of citizens who felt as westerners did. This was always the 
case. But nowhere, except near the frontier, where life was stand- 
ardized by the oppressive hand of economic barriers, could the 
opinion become homogeneous and the reaction universal. The 
debtor status preduced the greenback movement; the transporta- 
tion problem gave rise to the Patrons of Husbandry or the granger 
movement.? 

The greenback movement made its first appearance in the Ohio 
Valley States, and spread thence because of its appropriateness to 
the actual frontier and to the South where the Civil War had 
turned back the hand of time. Its first clear proponents were from 
Ohio, whence the name, “‘the Ohio Idea,” that was associated with 
it for a time. Its advocates were to be found in both great parties, 
but only the Democrats in their national platform of 1868 were 
willing to put in words the demand that “‘where the obligations of 
the government do not expressly state upon their face, or the law 
under which they were issued does not provide, that they shall be 
paid in coin, they ought in right and in justice, to be paid in lawful 
money of the United States.”” The “lawful money”’ referred to 
was the legal tender greenback currency of the Civil War; the pur- 
pose was to prevent deflation, to aid the debtor, and to lay a tax 
on wealth. 

The United States was forced upon a paper basis early in 1862 


1 The editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, Samuel Bowles, describes the 
West of his period in Our New West (1869). 


FRONTIER PANACEAS 523 


because the currency system had broken down and because a weak 
Treasury made a forced loan inevitable. At the outbreak of the 
war the country was upon a gold basis, with the actual currency 
consisting largely of bank notes, redeemable in gold coin. It was 
theoretically as legal to redeem them in silver dollars, but the 
theory was unimportant since, from the date of the currency law 
of 1834 fixing the relative weight of the dollars at 16:1, almost no 
silver dollars had been coined. Silver, undervalued at that ratio, 
found more profitable use in other forms than money. Gold alone 
was minted and used, and by 1861 the assumption of business was 
that when a dollar was called for, a gold dollar, or one redeemable 
in a gold dollar, was meant. There had been general suspension of 
specie redemption during the panic of 1857, but the banks had re- 
sumed payment before the war broke out. 

The resort of the Government to paper drove the banks to cease 
redemption in specie for the period of the war. The dollar there- 
after became the paper dollar, whose value was whatever the hope 
or fear of the Nation might ascribe to it. The public creditor was 
compelled to accept it; but he protected himself by raising the 
price of what he had to sell. The private creditor suffered confisca- 
tion when he was paid off in the depreciated paper, the loss being 
the difference between the gold value of the paper, and gold at par. 
From 1862 until 1864, when the greenbacks reached their lowest 
price (about thirty-five cents on the dollar), the loss was borne 
without means of evasion by every owner of property, every 
recipient of wages, and every person who lived upon a fixed in- 
come. The man who had a debt to pay absolved his debt on a 
basis more profitable each month as the buying value of the legal 
tender dollar declined.’ 

During this period of depreciated currency the United States 
incurred its debt which amounted to $2,846,000,000 in the autumn 
of 1865, and the farmers, merchants, manufacturers, and railroads 
incurred theirs. Most of the loans were made in dollars, and paya- 
ble in dollars. The United States had been unable to borrow only 
gold, and had been compelled to allow the buyer of its bonds to 
pay in greenbacks, which the Government again reissued. The 
contract for repayment sometimes called for coin, but more often 
did not specify what sort of money should be used. The passage 
of the legal tender acts, creating a paper money which the Govern- 
ment itself accepted, gave the basis for a demand that it was 

2 Wesley C. Mitchell, A History of the Greenbacks (1903). 


524 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


reasonable for the Government to pay out the kind of money it 
had itself received. There is much indirect evidence to show that 
the general expectation at the time of creation of the loans was that . 
they should be paid in gold; and that without this confidence the 
public credit would have sunk even lower than it did. 

When the war was over the first desire of the Treasury was to 
resume specie payments, an act which the world has ever accepted 
as marking the return of national solvency. This involved getting 
rid of the greenbacks in some way, by funding in bonds with the 
rest of the war debt, or cancellation, or redemption and destruc- 
tion. The Treasury urged it, and Congress in 1866 authorized the 
retirement by destruction of $4,000,000 worth of greenbacks by 
the Treasury each month. 

The act was no sooner passed than mutterings arose. The 
grievance was that the contraction of the currency to this extent 
(for there was no other money to replace the greenbacks thus 
destroyed) would lessen the amount of available money, that this 
would be followed by appreciation of the value of the dollar, and 
that as the result of this the payment of debts would be made 
more difficult, commerce would be impeded, and the holder of 
United States bonds or other investments would receive a more 
valuable dollar than he had lent. Men who had never felt a sense 
of outrage when the depreciating greenbacks wiped out the accu- 
mulated savings of the people, became indignant when their ap- 
preciation threatened to add to the burdens of the debtor. There 
were many debtors, and their political representatives voiced an 
appeal that the West and South accepted as valid almost without 
argument. This was “‘the Ohio Idea.” It went to the extent of 
protesting against any withdrawal of the greenbacks; and beyond 
that it advocated that the greenbacks ought to be used as “lawful 
money’’ to pay the interest and principal of all bonds whose face 
did not call for coin. In 1868 Congress repealed the law for the 
withdrawal of the greenbacks, after $44,000,000 had been can- 
celled, and the outstanding total had been reduced to $356,000,000. 
The only other available money in 1868 was the national bank 
notes, amounting to $295,800,000. 

The Democratic Party yielded to the greenback demand al- 
though its candidate in 1868 declared himself opposed to that 
portion of the platform. The Republicans, on the other hand, de- 
nounced “all forms of repudiation as a national crime,” and de- 
manded the payment of the debt in “the spirit of the laws under 


FRONTIER PANACEAS 525 


which it was contracted.” A resolution pledging the faith of the 
United States to coin payments and early resumption was passed 
early in Grant’s first term. In 1870 a funding bill was passed 
authorizing the funding of the Civil War bonds in long term bonds 
payable principal and interest in coin. Under this, most of the 
outstanding debt was refunded in the next nine years. In 1875 
a Resumption Act was passed, directing the Secretary of the 
Treasury to accumulate a gold reserve in order to resume the issu- 
ance of coin in exchange for greenbacks in January, 1879. 

Between 1865 and 1879 the value of the greenback dollar rose 
to par. Increasing confidence in the solvency of the United States 
had much to do with this. Increasing business that called each 
year for more money for its needs was in part responsible. The 
credit of the Government became impregnable as it became clear 
that Congress would not avail itself of any technical right in order 
to lessen the burden of its obligations. It would have been dis- 
creditable repudiation for the United States to issue an inferior 

currency for the purpose of lightening its national debt. 

But as the dollar rose to par the debtors’ grievance became more 
intense. It was quite true that the creditor was in a position of ad- 
vantage because of the way in which deflation was working out, 
and that the debtor was each year paying back a dollar that had 
a higher buying value than the year before. The same debt took 
more bushels of wheat or pounds of cotton. The loss inflicted upon 
the owners of property during the war by inflation and a depreciat- 
ing medium now fell quite as unfairly, upon the larger section of 
the people who were in debt. “‘The Ohio Idea” came to represent 
a determined grievance, bad enough in the prosperous years 1m- 
mediately after the war and unbearable during the panic after 
1873. 

In 1876 a National Greenback party ticket was in the field 
headed by the venerable Peter Cooper of New York. In this party 
the “‘rag baby,” as the eastern papers called the greenbacks, found 
a friend. The greenback orators asked why the money that was 
good enough for the soldiers during the war was not good enough 
for the money lender after peace, and spoke of the greenback issue 
as “the child of war and the savior of the country.”’ Cooper re- 
ceived the sympathy of much of the West, but not the votes. In 
1880 General James B. Weaver of Iowa was candidate of the same 
cause; and in 1884 General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. 
The program of cheap money was not strong enough to detach 


526 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Republicans from the party ticket when it came to election day, 
but the large vote that greenback and other inflation measures 
could command in Congress, in both parties and at almost any - 
time, indicates the non partisan uniformity of western economic 
opinion.? By 1879, when resumption took place, western condi- 
tions like those of the rest of the country, were improving. The 
greenback had come so close to par that it lost its capacity to 
arouse either hope or fear; and the responsible citizens of the West, 
having paid their debts and acquired credits in the bank, lost their 
desire or interest to depreciate the currency. Always when in 
debt, the frontier has been susceptible to inflationist theories of 
finance, but this time it recovered before it gained its point. 

An abiding distrust of banks, corporations, and creditors was left 
in the western mind as the greenback movement subsided. And 
if this was not enough to provide a permanent basis for political 
cohesion, an additional influence was brought to bear by another 
of the factors of the frontier situation. The vital force of land 
economics has been stressed on many occasions; the greenback 
movement was only one aspect of the western sensitiveness to 
matters affecting its access to credit for its development. Its route 
to a market, upon which permanent solvency depended, was now 
over the railroads. Transportation had become a tax. Whether 
too heavy or not, whether fair or discriminatory, the tax was so 
universal that its control came as a new element into the political 
consciousness of the country, and there arose a frontier protest 
against leaving this general tax to be levied for private interest by 
private corporations.‘ 

The protest against the railroads came earliest, of necessity, in 
the section where the issue was clearest and least mixed with other 
issues. During the early period of railroad construction, the new 
methods of communication were thought of as local, and supple- 
mentary to preéxisting methods of transportation. Few were so 
visionary as to suppose that railroads would ever be able to out- 
compete the water routes. The rivers that were well established 
before the railroads came were expected to continue to bear their 
share. So were the canals. Until after the outbreak of the Civil 


* Two valuable collections of personal manuscripts of greenbackers are the Ignatius 
Donnelly papers (Minnesota State Historical Society), and the Luman H. Weller papers 
(State Historical Society of Wisconsin). 

4 John D. Hicks, “The Political Career of Ignatius Donnelly,” and ‘‘The Origin and 
Early History of the Farmers’ Alliance in Minnesota,” in Mississippi Valley Historical 
Review, vols. vu and rx. 


FRONTIER PANACEAS 527 


War there were few railroads that were not forced to take into ac 
eount the rival attractions of some natural highway or water route. 
The lines that made up the New York Central system, or the 
Pennsylvania, had for competitors the lake steamers and the Erie 
Canal. The Illinois Central had ever beside it the Mississippi. 
The Ohio River was regarded as a permanent highway for the 
_freights between Pittsburgh and the Gulf of Mexico. Only the 
experience of the Civil War, in which the trunk lines gathered up 
the business and clung to it even after the Mississippi had been 
_ made a Union stream, suggested that there was in the railroads a 
power to dominate the situation, and to offer a service so impelling 
as to eliminate its rivals. Could this be done, there was nothing to 
prevent the monopoly of transportation from falling to the rail- 
roads or to prevent them from loading the business with “‘all the 
traffic would bear.” In proportion as the exchange of commodi- 
ties between the sections became more common, or necessary, the 
routes and costs became unavoidable, and it fell into the power 
of the men and corporations who controlled these carriers to wield 
destructive powers — perhaps for the common good, but perhaps 
also for lust of power, personal advantage, or corporate profit. 
The first clear glimpse of this prospect was caught on the prairie 
farms north and west of Chicago, where the condition of the 
natural routes prevented the development of any highways similar 
in importance to the Lakes or the Ohio River. North of the lati- 
tude of St. Louis the Mississippi is so shallow and treacherous as 
to lose its carrying capacity. The smaller local streams were none 
of them safely navigable. But the only crops the country could as 
yet produce were cheap and bulky. The corn and wheat of the 
Illinois and Iowa farms could not be raised with profit during the 
earlier stages of the development of these States; similarly Wis- 
consin and Minnesota lagged. The country northwest of Chicago 
began to develop only after the opening of the Erie Canal, and 
grew to economic importance only as railroads threaded their 
counties to bring out the crop. There was here a degree of de- 
pendence upon the railroad not equaled in any other large section 
of the Union. Even here it could not be seen so long as the major 
emphasis was upon the construction of the lines, and the times 
were good. With the lines done, and the times hard, the one firm 
thing that the suffering farmer could see was the irreducible freight 
rate, set high because the railroad was a private business operated 
for profit, and because ill-advised individual speculation had often 


528 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


built two roads where one would have done, or one where none 
could be supported. Most of them were wastefully, ignorantly, 
and, often, dishonestly constructed. The heavy fixed costs of the 
bonded debt, and the pressure of stockholders for dividends, held 
the railroads to the task of squeezing their revenue out of the 
country, regardless of its economic condition. ‘There was here no 
alternative route to moderate rates by competition, and no com- 
plex business entanglement to obscure the relation of the railroads 
to prosperity. 

The railroads that were added to the mileage of the United 
States between 1860 and the panic of 1873, brought most of Iowa, 
Minnesota, and Wisconsin within their net, and enabled their 
spectacular growth. In these three States the population rose 
from 1,623,000 in 1860 to 2,684,000 in 1870. Illinois alone in- 
creased more than 800,000 in this decade. These and the million 
newcomers in the three neighbor States were drawn in by high 
prices for farm products, easy money, and fertile farms. By 1870 
their leaders were wondering how it was to be possible to pay the 
debts incurred in the process. | 

The new constitution framed by the State of Illinois in 1869 and 
1870 indicates that the old apprehension that had been directed to- 
ward the banks in the Jacksonian constitutions was now directed 
toward the railroads and the grain elevators. The latter were de- 
clared to be “‘public warehouses,” whoever might own them; and 
provisions for the regulation of both types of utilities were written 
into the constitution. Acting under these new powers, the legis- 
lature in 1873 created a Railway and Warehouse Commission with 
a revolutionary power, to fix the rates. The idea that such utilities 
were subject to public control swept rapidly across the Northwest 
States, as the public came to appreciate the quasi-taxing power 
of railroad and elevator rates. In 1874 Minnesota created a com- 
mission with power to fix rates; and in the same year Iowa and 
Wisconsin both enacted complete tariffs of maximum rates as 
statutes. The movement for regulation was already well started 
before the panic of 1873 occurred. The resulting hard times, with 
a slack market and falling prices, accentuated still further the 
rigidity of the freight rates, and made it easy to diabolize the in- 
fluence of the railroads in the economic life of the country. 

The tendency to seek for a cause of agricultural depression 
turned politics against the railroads, and brought to life a sponta- 
peous organization among the farmers to further their own inter- 


FRONTIER PANACEAS 529 


ests. The farmer of the Middle West was a different type of man 
in 1870 from what he had been after the panic of 1819. He had 
then allowed the political leaders to shape his remedies, and had 
followed Henry Clay or Andrew Jackson according to his frame of 
mind. But he had been incapable of organization upon an agrarian 
_ basis, and had possessed the undiluted individualism of the remote 
frontier. The Middle West farmer was no longer on the actual 
frontier, although some frontier traits still lasted. The plains 
farmer, developing railroad lands, or double-minimum lands that 
the Government had reserved, was less of a frontiersman than the 
Democrat of 1820, even though his tasks were much the same. He 
had access through railroad, telegraph, and newspapers to the 
centers and ideas of the world. He had more formal education, 
and had become something of a technician through his use of 
machinery. He had more banking knowledge, for he had more 
obligations. He had more normal contacts with his fellows, and 
was susceptible of organization. 

The Patrons of Husbandry was one of the numerous societies 
formed after the Civil War when a craving for formal association 
was showing itself throughout American life.’ Its avowed purpose 
was to extend the advantages of education and relaxation to 
farmers, and to improve their position by association and self- 
help. Its organizers, some of them Government workers at 
Washington, saw the South as the natural field for the ventures of 
the Patrons of Husbandry, for in the South farming was on the 
verge of a complete reorganization because of the abolition of 
slavery. But the society did not take hold. There was no demand 
for it, and the local granges that it formed had few members. Its 
mechanism comprised local chapters, or granges, to whose meet- 
ings farmers and their families came for picnics and discussion. 
Women were admitted, and the children came along as they must 
to any gathering attended by their parents. The granges were by 
profession non political, existing for social and economic advan- 
tage. 

The local granges were gathered into State granges, and these 
in turn into the National grange, at whose congresses large matters 
of agricultural policy were discussed. The imposing title of the 


5 Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement. A Study of Agricultural Organization and ita 
Political, Economic, and Social Manifestations (1913), is a model study; Fred E. Haynes, 
Third Party Movements since the Civil War with Special Reference to Iowa (1916) is more 
general than its title promises, because Iowa has never entirely missed a reform movement. 


530 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


society soon dropped from use, leaving the grange as the real 
name. The granges began to grow in number and membership 
after 1870. As the farmers’ grievances crystallized the granger - 
movement spread. In the South it never became dominant, but 
in the country northwest of Chicago it swept the States. In 1872 
and 1873 its membership leaped by thousands, reaching perhaps 
1,600,000 at its height. Its contemporary historian® gave its- 
temper in his preface: “‘For several years past the country has 
been suffering from evils of which all have been conscious, but 
which none had the courage to remedy, until the Grange took up 
the cause of the oppressed. Prominent among these are the 
burdens that have been fastened upon the people by the reckless 
and unscrupulous course of the great Railroad Monopolies that 
have sprung up in our midst. These vast and powerful corpora- 
tions have inaugurated a series of abuses which have gradually 
and effectually undermined the solid basis upon which our finances 
were supposed to rest. They have debauched and demoralized our 
Courts and Legislatures; have bribed and taken into their pay the 
high public officials charged with the making and execution of our 
laws; have robbed the nation of a domain sufficient to constitute 
an empire; have flooded the land with worthless stocks and other 
so-called securities; have established a system of gambling at our 
financial centers that has resulted in a monetary crisis which must 
cover the whole land with ruin and suffering; have set at defiance 
the laws of the land, and have trampled upon individual rights and 
liberties, openly boasting that they are too powerful to be made 
answerable to the law.”’ 

It was but natural, when the Northwest was thoroughly aware 
of its grievances against the railroads that elections should turn 
upon this issue. The grange itself played a small part in politics, 
but the grangers were also citizens, whose whole history was a 
succession of episodes in which the Government of the United 
States, or of the States had been turned to for economic relief. The 
granger laws, passed by the legislatures at the bidding of their 
constituents, were designed to bring the railroads under the con- 
trol of law, and to assert the right of the public to share in their 
control. 


6 J. D. McCabe [Edward Martin, pseudonym], History of the Granger Movement; or, The 
Farmer's War against Monopolies (1874), was a popular subscription work when the move- 
ment was at its height. It economized in illustrations, lifting some of them with only a 
tendencial change in captions, from John H. Beadle, Our Undeveloped West; or Five Years 
tn the Territories (1873). 


FRONTIER PANACEAS 531 


The first reaction of the eastern owners of railroads to the 
granger laws of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois was one of open con- 
tempt and antipathy. The antagonism was everywhere worse be- 
cause the money invested in western railroad property was com- 
monly drawn from centers remote from the railroads themselves. 
_ Absenteeism served to accentuate the normal differences due to 
the relation of debtor and creditor. Many provisions of the rate 
laws were unworkable because the angry farmer legislators had 
not known enough to make a rate, and were inspired only by the 
determination that the rates should come down. The railroads 
took advantage of this and paid little attention to the legal rates. 
They claimed that any such fixation was an interference with their 
constitutional rights. 

The railroad defense against rate fixing by public authority was 
based upon two lines of argument; one, that it was against the 
clause of the Constitution of the United States giving Congress 
power “to regulate commerce among the several States,” the 
other, that it involved a taking of property without “‘due process 
of law”’; and both came eventually before the highest courts for 
determination. The greatest of the State decisions was by the 
Chief Justice of Wisconsin, Edward George Ryan, who in Sep- 
tember, 1874, completely upheld the right of the State to legislate 
on rates. The Supreme Court of the United States heard argu- 
ments upon several cases rising under the laws of the various 
States, and handed down its basic decision in the spring of 1877, 
in the case of Munn vs. Illinois. Chief Justice Waite, who delivered 
the opinion, followed the Wisconsin argument, and showed how 
since time immemorial the English common law had given to the 
people the right to establish rules “requiring each citizen to so 
conduct himself, and so use his own property, as not unnecessarily 
to injure another.” This had applied to ferries, common carriers, 
hackmen, bakers, and millers; and maximum charges had long 
been fixed for services rendered. ‘When private property 1s de- 
voted to a public use,” he said, “it is subject to public regula- 
tion.” The Supreme Court upheld the granger laws as fair in 
principle, and not interfering with the constitutional powers of 
the United States Government. It was a blow to the ideas that 
had hitherto prevailed in the conduct of private business in the 
United States, to have the public admitted as a partner in the 
venture, and it marked a great turning point in the development 
of American Government. It is significant, that the point was 


5382 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


first pressed by the West, and found its earliest victories in the 
region where frontier simplicity first revealed it. It was another 
case in which the frontier grievance was translated into a national - 
policy. ier Th 


CHAPTER LVI 
THE COW COUNTRY 


THE Indian Country, as Monroe and Calhoun conceived it, and as 
it was executed between 1825 and 1841, was the product of one 
frontier situation. It came inevitably, with the need to provide 
for the native races; its setting was contributed to by the miscon- 
ception of western resources and the Rocky Mountain barrier of 
the United States; it was destroyed as the natural consequence of 
the development of the Pacific Slope. 

The overland mail service was similar in its development. It 

could not have been imagined before the Mexican War; it could 
not have been avoided after it; and its term of life was ended not 
by forces operating within itself but by the external influence of 
the railroad movement. 
_ The railroads themselves induced and destroyed a third episode 
whose habitat was on the high plains. Between the close of the 
Civil War and the completion of the continental railroad system, 
1865-1885, they both brought the cow country into being and 
destroyed it forever. The initial fact that began the short life of 
the cow country was the discovery, about 1865, that beef cattle 
could be bred and fattened on the plains, and delivered by the 
railroads to the markets in the Middle West, more cheaply than 
beef could be produced locally upon the farm. 

Food was the least of American problems, whether in the older 
settlements or along the frontier margins. There was rough plenty 
everywhere after the first years of new development. The native 
Indian corn in its various forms of meal, hominy, whiskey, and 
pork, was a sure preventive of starvation. Travelers among the 
seaboard towns, in the eighteenth century, reveal the fact that in 
the more favored regions there was even a cuisine based upon the 
fundamentals, supplemented by wild game and the various forms of 
sea food. But the cuisine was in most places satisfying rather than 
attractive; plentiful rather than varied. Pork, chicken, and less 
often veal, were the reliance for the meats. Beef was generally poor. 
The domestic cattle on the farms were poor milkers and yielded 
inferior beef, while the lack of facilities for preserving fresh meat 
drove the country dweller to dry his beef or cornit. But such as 
it was, food was plentiful, and was everywhere locally obtainable. 


534 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


In the earliest chapters of frontier expansion one reads of swine 
raised for the market, and marching to it. The settlers of the 
Valley turned their hogs loose, allowing them to multiply and . 
adapt themselves to life in the open. The animals became wild and 
self-supporting; and from time to time they were gathered into 
droves and driven eastward over the common trails. Furnishing 
their own transportation, western swine became a competitor of — 
eastern farm-grown hogs early in the nineteenth century. A little 
later there are records of cattle driven to Louisville or Cincinnati; 
or to St. Louis or Chicago. The furnishing of meat, fresh or 
packed, was generally a local task, and the growing towns had 
little difficulty in finding enough animals in their immediate 
vicinity. Cincinnati became an early packing center, developing 
a large trade down the river. The South provided the only con- 
siderable market aside from local needs, for only in the South did 
a rural population fail to raise its own food. The economics of the 
plantation made it seem profitable to keep the negroes in the 
cotton field and buy their pork, rather than to diversify their 
work by requiring them to produce it at home. In every considera- 
ble town the stock yards and the slaughter houses were unavoida- 
ble nuisances, which local government tried to abate somewhat by 
regulation, but which were offensive all the year and foul in sum- 
mer. As the cities grew, and dwellings encroached upon the mar- 
gins of the stock yards, the problem was raised of the degree of 
power possessed by the municipalities to suppress useful business 
for the common good. With every chapter of city growth, there 
was another arrangement of the slaughter pens, and a revived pro- 
test against permitting herds of swine, sheep, and cattle to be 
driven through the city streets. In Chicago, where a packing in- 
dustry second only to that of Cincinnati was growing up, a group 
of speculators bought a half section of prairie lands on Halsted 
Street, consolidated all the various dealers’ interests, and opened 
at Christmas, 1865, the Union Stock Yards. It was large consoli- 
dation, but Chicago was a growing city, with an export trade. 
The cons»lidation was a natural process following a generation of 
slaughtering activity. Nothing was further from the minds of the 
men who put it through than that, at the moment of the opening 
of the Union Yards, the business of preparing food was on the eve 
of a complete and permanent revolution. 


1 Rudolf A. Clemen, The American Livestock and Meat Industry (1923), bas a sound his- 
torical basis, is minutely analytical, and contains a full bibliography. 


THE COW COUNTRY 535 


At about the moment when Chicago consolidated its yards, and 
other cities thought it necessary so to do, it was discovered that 
the high plains possessed a new resource.” In the autumn of 1866, 
the rumor runs, some teams of bullock trains were stalled by snow 
upon the plains of western Nebraska. The freighting business was 
at its height. Every western camp required a minimum of supplies 
which could be obtained only from the East and delivered only 
in prairie schooners, hauled by oxen. Since the beginning of the 
overland migrations in the early forties the freight traffic had 
grown in volume. The army on the plains was a heavy consumer 
of supplies. The stage companies had stations to be provided. 
The Indian agencies received annual caravans of goods for the use 
of their wards. And the patient ox pulled the load. 

The oxen that figure in the story were abandoned when a snow- 
fall made it impossible to continue the journey that season. The 
drivers cached the wagons as well as they could, pegged down 
tarpaulins over them, and rode their horses back to the Missouri, 
charging the oxen up to unavoidable loss. In the following spring 
they returned to the caches, with new animals, to take the aban- 
doned wagons to their destination. They expected to find the 
whitened bones of their abandoned stock, but found instead the 
animals themselves, sleek, fat, and ready for the block. 

It ought not to have occasioned much surprise, but the idea was 
new. It was common knowledge that the buffalo herd lived on the 
open plains, drifting north each spring with the fresh pasturage, 
and south each fall before the winter frosts. The Indian had found 
the bison a general purpose animal, that provided food, clothing, 
shelter, and fuel. The rough pelt of the beast was not valuable 
enough to bear the cost of carriage for long distances, but as soon 
as settlements reached the margin of the buffalo range the hides 
were valued locally for coats and robes. Among the earliest freight 
shipments from the rail heads of the continental railroads were 
bales of buffalo skins that could now for the first time seek a re- 
mote market. The swain of the seventies did his winter courting 
in the moderate space afforded by his cutter, and warmed by the 
generous thickness of the buffalo robe. 

The southwest roads, as soon as they impinged upon the plains 
of Texas, found similar freights in bales of hides of beef cattle. 


2 F. L. Paxson, “The Cow Country,” in American Historical Review, vol. xxm; and Clara 
M. Love, “History of the Cattle Industry in the Southwest,’ in Southwestern Historical 
Quarterly, vol. xrx, give many details and references. 


536 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


There were wild herds of these, the offspring of strays from the old 
Spanish settlements, that were acclimated to the Texas plains, and 
that had bred themselves to a resilient and vivacious long-horned. 
stock. Too tough for their flesh to have a market, they first ac- 
quired value when their hides could be collected and shipped to 
the tanneries, leaving their carcasses to bleach upon the plains. 

The advent of the railroad coincided with the discovery that 
beeves could winter in the open on the plains, and brought sig- 
nificance to what had always been known about the plentiful crop 
of spring grass. There arose at once a cattle industry through 
which the cow country became a reality. The approaching rail- 
roads of the later sixties found waiting for them the herds of stock 
at Marshall, Dodge City, Abilene, or Ogallala. The promised 
profits of the business were large, entry upon it was easy, the ice 
machine and the refrigerator car made it possible to conserve the 
product, and the growing city population in the East provided a 
hungry market. 

The great plains, from central Kansas to the Rockies, and from 
the Rio Grande to Canada, became the cow country, and re- 
mained the cow country until the open range was closed. The inci- 
dents of the business were simple, but were new to frontier agri- 
culture. They grouped around the problems of breeding, the 
round-up, the long drive, and the marketing process, each of which 
became standardized almost instantaneously with the appearance 
of the traffic. 

The breeding was concentrated on the Texas plains, which had 
proved their fitness by the presence of the wild herds. The cows 
of these herds became the mothers of calves that were destined 
from birth for the butcher’s block. In the mild climate of this 
region there was a low mortality of mothers and offspring, and the 
herds roamed at pleasure over vast stretches of pasturage that no 
one owned but the State of Texas. The resulting meat was natu- 
rally tough, but as soon as a market appeared steps were taken to 
improve the breed. The mothers were preserved, prolific and re- 
sourceful, breeding sturdy calves. For sires, imported bulls were 
selected and brought in — Short-horn, Hereford, Polled Angus, 
and Galloway. The scrub bulls were rapidly weeded out of the 
herds, and each spring saw a better crop of calves. Regardless of 
their owners, the herds ranged together over the plains. Once a 
year at least the owners codperated to identify and select the stock 
that was ready for the market. 


THE COW COUNTRY 537 


The round-up was the earliest of many picturesque events that 
attracted public attention to the new industry; yet the institution 
was by no means new. The cattle were marked by brand upon the 
flank, and branding as a means of identification was of ancient 
origin. There were brand books early in colonial history, for they 
could not be avoided as long as cattle ranged at large. When the 
time came for the round-up, generally in May, at which time the 
spring calves were large enough to eat the fresh grass, yet not too 
large to heel behind their respective mothers, the neighborhood 
came suddenly to life. The various breeders, with their men, made 
a great circle around the margins of the grazing ground of their 
herd, and drove slowly to the center. There was wisdom in the 
slow drive, for anything that excited the animals injured their 
condition, and might even incite them to destructive and suicidal 
stampedes. Their destination was some convenient central camp 
or station, where a branding gang was organized, with pens and 
with as many different irons as owners. 

As the herds came in, the yearling steers, branded the season 
before, were cut out of the herd, and penned in a corral, where 
each owner could identify and select his own. The cows, with 
calves at heel, were driven to the branding pens, where each calf 
was given the brand of the mother that it followed. The stray 
calves, that could not be identified by filial affection, were herded 
by themselves, to be divided and branded, pro rata, at the close 
of the round-up. There was no sure way of determining parentage 
for these. Mavericks they were called, taking their name from a 
too enterprising rancher who had acquired notoriety by cutting 
out the unbranded calves before the round-up, and marking them 
with his own brand. After the round-up was completed, the cows 
and calves were turned loose again to pasture upon the public 
ground, while the yearlings were made ready for the “long drive,” 
or sale, or both. 

At this point in the story the cowboy made his principal en- 
trance. During the period of breeding, the cattle ranged over a 
wide area with little attention, and much of the help used at the 
round-up was of a temporary character. But from the moment 
that the yearlings were separated from the herd it became neces- 
sary to employ men to live with them, keep them from danger, 
guard them from cattle thieves, and deliver them finally to an 
ultimate buyer. This was a relatively new occupation for the 
border, and recruited its men from the ranks of drifters. The cow- 


| 


| 


5388 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


boys became as definite a type as the border ever produced. They 
worked in small gangs, living in the saddle, and operating from a 
headquarters on wheels — the chuck wagon, where was the cook, 
as well as the materials for their sketchy camps. Emerson Hough 
has told The Story of the Cowboy (1897), Philip A. Rollins has more 
deliberately collected the facts of his life in The Cowboy (1922), 
Frederick Remington has immortalized him with pencil and brush, 
and John A. Lomax, in Cowboy Songs (1910, with many reprints), 
has collected the folk-songs which whiled away his loneliness. 
Hermann Hagedorn has revealed him through the eyes of one of 
his most eminent appreciators in Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (1921). 
The cowboy remains, a generation after he disappeared, one of the 
most thrilling characters of fiction and American romance. The 
great showman, Col. William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), made him an 
international figure in the most distinctive of American entertain- 
ments. 

From the round-up the steers were started towards the slaughter 
house, in the custody of bands of cowboys. Many of the animals 
were driven to the nearest rail head, so that Hutchinson and Dodge 
City, in Kansas, on the Santa Fé, became the earliest of the cow 
towns. After the round-ups the various herds moved slowly across 
the public domain to these points, where the buyers from the East 
came to meet them. The cowboys had nothing to do with the 
sales; the owners of the cattle made the negotiation and the steers 
changed hands. From these towns long trains of cattle cars carried 
their freight to the cattle pens. In the towns the cowboys, relieved 
of the unbearable tedium of stock guarding on the plains, found 
recreation and dissipation. The cow town in the later seventies 
took the place held a little earlier by the railroad terminal camp, 
and by the mining camps of the early sixties. It was the most law- 
less place known, where armed men gambled away their substance, 
and shot away their lives, unconcerned with the orderly progress 
of society. 

But only a fraction of the steers started so promptly for the 
market. Most of them, in the vicinity of the Kansas cow towns 
changed owners, but not habits. Their southern breeders sold 
them to northern feeders, who left them on the plains, in charge 
of new gangs of cowboys. Here began the long drive, as it was in 
fact, and as the border soon denominated it. From Texas up to 
the Canadian Northwest stretched an unbroken expanse of native 
grass, plentiful enough for grazing purposes. Animals could be 


THE COW COUNTRY 539 


fattened here at government expense, with the owners paying only 
moderate amounts for stock tending. The cowboys started their 
charges northward, letting them set their own pace, grazing and 
ripening as they went. From central Texas, across the Indian 
Country soon to be Oklahoma, through Kansas west of Dodge 
City, ran the route of the long drive, which ended for some years at 
Ogallala, a station on the Union Pacific in western Kansas. This 
became another cow town, with all the local accompaniments of 
cattle barons, bad men, romping cowboys, and gambling halls. 
When the Northern Pacific began to build, it created a station still 
further north, lengthening the long drive to the Yellowstone, above 
the Bad Lands of Dakota. Here in Montana Territory, near Fort 
Keogh, Miles City arose, and Glendive, somewhat below Miles City, 
where the Northern Pacific first touches the Yellowstone. In later 
years the long drive occasionally pushed across Montana to Sas- 
katchewan, and the Canadian Pacific near Moose Jaw and Regina. 
Eventually the cattle were destined for an eastern market, and 
their owners, during the long drive, were carefully watching the 
market and hoping to get a top price. At the northern destina- 
tions the steers were packed into the cattle cars and freighted to 
Chicago or Kansas City. It was never practicable to slaughter 
them on the plains, although some ventures of this sort were made. 
As the cars of steers pulled into the packing cities, the buyers 
sought the stock yards, and paid what they chose; for the owners 
could not do anything with the animals but sell them. From this 
fact, and because the owner was at the mercy of the packer, arose 
an additional phase of the cow country, the ranch. If the owner 
could hold his cattle cheaply, and ship only when the market was 
right, he could improve his price. It was too expensive, however, 
to employ the gangs of cowboys forever, even if a tract of land 
suitable for holding the herd could be obtained. At just the 
strategic moment, invention caught up with the necessities of the 
treeless plains, and Yankee ingenuity devised the wire fence. 
Early in the eighties, cowmen developed northern ranches, near 
the Union Pacific or Northern Pacific. Their equipment included 
a dwelling and a grazing area of the public domain; either fenced 
or protected by their “‘ squatter right.”’ Upon these ranches they 
turned the steers at the end of the long drive, and here they held 
them, sometimes for another year. Such a ranch as this Theodore 
Roosevelt became interested in shortly after leaving college.* At 
8 Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1891). 


540 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Chimney Butte, where the Northern Pacific crosses the Little Mis- 
souri in Dakota Territory, he buried an investment, acquired ro- 
bust health and much experience, and learned to know his West. . 

The range cattle business, with the cow country as its habitat, 
sprang into life almost full fledged from the beginning. While it 
was still young it made its imprint upon American life at many 
points. First the flood of cattle upset the equilibrium at the stock 
yards, and the farmer raisers of cattle found themselves hit by the 
competition of range cattle, quite the equal of their own, and 
growing finer every year. Next the packers found an endless 
supply of cattle, and enlarged their industry. Around the yards 
grew packing towns, with not only the slaughter houses, and the 
usual packing impedimenta, but new products and new processes. 
It was some years before the legend arose that the only part of the 
animal that could not be turned to profit was the squeal; but soon 
the hides, the hair, the bones, the hooves, the blood, and the entrails 
became the raw materials for new manufactures and the source of 
enduring profits. Refrigeration and the happy invention of a tin 
canning machine changed the form in which the meat sought the 
consumer. Fresh beef, tinned, was soon ready for export; and meat 
in sides, in chilled cars, emigrated from the West to introduce new 
panic among the growers and butchers of the East. 

The fact seems to be that the United States could well afford to 
eat more meat, and liked the new beef better than its former 
supply. The flood of beef from the range lowered the price and in- 
duced increased consumption. It started an export trade that in 
the seventies spread the new competition one stage further, to 
Europe. Beef shipments on the hoof, in the form of frozen sides, in 
tubs, and in tins flooded western Europe, and stimulated the 
growth of protective policies in England, France, Germany, and 
Italy. In some countries frank protective duties sought to keep 
out the cheap American rival of the native beef. In others the 
same end was attained indirectly through the imposition of quar- 
antines. It was conveniently discovered that American cattle were 
subject to diseases that made them a menace to European herds, 
and unfitted their flesh for consumption. Out of these competi- 
tions arose still new complexities for the traffic. 

The transportation of the animals and the meat gave business 
to the railroads, which sought to follow the prevailing practice and 


4 Joseph Nimmo, Report in Regard to the Range and Ranch Cattle Business (48th Congress, 
¢d Session, House Executive Document 267, Serial 2304). 


THE COW COUNTRY 5AI 


charge all the traffic would bear. The struggle over rates and the 
fierce competitions and secret rebates, brought the industry into 
the clutches of the railroad problem. The magnitude of the great 
packing firms allied it with the terrifying problems of monopoly. 
The suspicion that the meat might be tainted or diseased created a 
demand for government control. Only when the United States 
could certify that it had watched every stage of the process, and 
could guarantee the product, could it break down the European 
wall of quarantine. In 1884 the Bureau of Animal Industry in the 
Department of Agriculture opened a new chapter of government 
Inspection and control. 

The natural effect of the panic of 1873 was to set a limit to the 
growth of the beef*industry so long as the period of depression 
lasted. With the return of prosperity about 1879, the cow men felt 
the boom, and the cow country hurried on to the most active 
period of its prosperity. The government as a silent partner, own- 
ing the grazing grounds and contributing free grass, was at the 
basis of the bonanza; but the cattle barons acted as though their 
activity was of right, and from 1879 to 1885 each year saw the 
trails more crowded with herds, and the long drive more densely 
populated with steers apd cowboys. The very conditions that 
created the prosperity, compelled the dissolution. 

As suddenly as it arose, the cow country disappeared in the last 
half of the eighties, for reasons as obvious as those that caused it. 
Overstocking of the plains was among the primary causes. It was 
cheap and easy to build up a herd. There was no natural limit to 
the number of cattle that could be bred in Texas, and the widely 
advertised profits of cattle raising overplayed the hand. Since 
nearly all were trespassers on public land, there was no basis for 
concerted action to reduce the size of the herds to something 
approximating the demand. Cattle growers associations were 
formed, but could rarely reach agreements or enforce them. The 
range became crowded, the pasturage scarce, and the flood of 
steers at the stock yards placed both breeders and feeders at the 
mercy of the railroads and the packers. 

The railroads that made the cow country possible destroyed 
it as they normally progressed. Along the eastern margin of the 
plains was the line of agricultural settlements. During the sixties 
this line was retarded in its westward progress by continuous 
Indian friction. But with the cessation of Indian wars and 
renewed railroad building, the migration of the farmers was 


542 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


resumed. Every homestead taken up in Kansas, Nebraska, or 
Dakota, restricted the region of free grass; for the farmer did not 
welcome the drifting cowboys, and enforced their proprietary 
rights with shotguns and wire fences. The nesters, as they were 
called, were as incompatible with the open long drive as farmers 
had ever been with the wild Indians of the frontier. Two kinds 
of civilization could not well endure together and at once. Before 
1885 the rapid settlement of the plains had thrust the open range 
into western Kansas, and narrowed its extent. 

At the northern end of the range, the economies of the cattle 
men themselves served to restrict their opportunity. Every en- 
closure built at a northern ranch forced all other cow men to drive 
around, or blocked them off from running Water and the finest 
pastures. The files at Washington are filled with complaints of 
this. Shotgun law was effective. Often the carriers of the mails 
found their well-known routes (barricaded by new fences and de- 
termined cowboys who cared nothing for the law. Between the 
homesteads of the nesters along the eastern margin of the range, 
and the larger enclosures of the ranches near the northern rail- 
roads, an end of the open range was brought in sight. Every 
western railroad broke it up, and every town enlarged the area 
where the cow men were unwelcome. 

The fear of disease added to the restrictions by 1884 and 1885. 
Much of the European prejudice against American cattle was 
founded upon business rather than upon hygienic considerations. 
But there was some disease. There was Texas fever, and hoof and 
mouth disease, both readily contagious, and spreading infection 
widely among the herds. The long drive was admirably adapted 
to spread disease. By actual contact, an infected herd carried dis- 
aster all along the trail. The ground that it grazed over became 
infected, and subsequent cattle picked up the disease. The busi- 
ness contained the seeds of its own destruction. 

The plains States recognized the threats against the prosperity 
of the industry and sought to protect themselves by creating 
boards of health, and enforcing quarantines. The United States 
owned the domain, but Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado con- 
trolled the local government. When these, by 1885, had enacted 
rigorous laws against the driving of foreign cattle across their 
borders, the long drive necessarily came to an end, and with it 
ended the cattle business on the free-grass basis. As a final phe- 
nomenon there appeared in 1884 and 1885 a demand from the 


THE COW COUNTRY 543 


cattle owners associations that the Government of the United 
States itself intervene again, and set aside a national quarantined 
cattle trail from Texas to Canada, and continue at its expense 
in the partnership so profitable to the cow men. The national 
cattle trail was impracticable, but its very suggestion identifies the 
cow country as a normal frontier episode. 

The cow country thus became a phenomenon of the last Ameri- 
can frontier. It could not have appeared before the railroads 
reached the eastern margin of the great plains; it could not have 
taken shape had the plains been available for immediate agricul- 
ture, as were States like Iowa and Illinois. It could not survive the 
completion of the railroads and the inevitable penetration of the 
plains by farmers. Without the coincidence of wire fences, re- 
frigeration and packing technique, its development must have 
been curtailed. But with all these, it rose to a spectacular and 
ephemeral prominence, calling attention once more to the Ameri- 
can Far West at the very moment when the Far West and the 
frontier were to disappear forever. 


CHAPTER LVII 
THE CLOSED FRONTIER 


Turoucu the completion of the continental railroads the cow 
country found its Nemesis and the open frontier was destroyed. 
The period of destruction falls into two episodes, separated by the 
depression after 1873. In the earlier of these, the railroad charters 
were enacted by Congress, the land-grants were provided, and the 
first promoters began the search for funds with which to do the 
work. The projects stopped literally in their tracks when the panic 
struck them. They remained abandoned for several building 
seasons, during which the companies passed through the pangs of 
failure, foreclosure, and reorganization. They were not revived 
until the dawn of prosperity was again visible, in the administra- 
tion of Rutherford B. Hayes. By 1879 they were all again at work, 
with a nervous activity that brought them to completion in five 
years more. 

_ The name of Henry Villard is intimately connected with the 
events that led to the completion of the Northern Pacific. Villard 
was a German immigrant, a newspaper man who thought his work 
as correspondent in the Civil War worth the bulk of the space in 
his Memoirs (1904). He acquired an interest in the railroad situa- 
tion when, after the panic of 1873, he was employed as special 
representative by German investors who had taken stock in this 
company at the instigation of Jay Cooke. As head of various stock 
or bond holders committees he was drawn into the mesh of re- 
organization; and he had a head for strategy that let him see vital 
factors that the Northern Pacific was itself overlooking. He ob- 
served that the line ran only to Wallula near the mouth of the 
Snake River, and that by voluntary decision the Northern Pacific 
was to entrust its coast business to a river steamboat system. He 
watched his chance to acquire control not only of the navigation 
company, but of the Oregon Railroad, already existing in the 
Columbia Valley. These he merged into the Oregon Railway and 
Navigation Company, with which he declared war upon the 
Northern Pacific while the latter was resuming construction and 
finishing its main line after 1879. The president of the Northern 
Pacific, Frederick Billings, still saw no menace in the fact that no 


THE CLOSED FRONTIER 545 


freight could reach the coast without paying tribute to Villard’s 
consolidation, and refused to come to a traffic agreement. 

In June, 1881, Villard organized his “blind pool,” for whose un- 
revealed purposes he borrowed from his New York friends. With 
the resulting funds he quietly acquired control of the Northern 
Pacific, as well as of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Com- 
pany, transferring the joint holdings to a new holding company, 
the Oregon and Transcontinental. At the next meeting, he 
voted Billings out of the Northern Pacific, himself into the presi- 
dency of the three related corporations, and proceeded to complete 
the lines. In September, 1883, he celebrated the driving of the last 
spike of the Northern Pacific, by running his “Golden Spike 
Special” across the continent, laden with a company of distin- 
guished guests, to whom he revealed the resources of the new 
empire. There was still no State between Minnesota and Oregon, 
and no immediate prospect of any, but he could show the rising 
tide of migration towards the newly opened country. There was 
‘no titter of realization stirred up by his advertising device. Con- 
tinental railroads were ceasing to be a novelty. Even the New 
York Nation, which he had acquired in 1881, refused to show ex- 
citement, for Godkin wrote “... the country can never feel again 
the thrill which the joining of the Central and Union Pacific lines 
gave it.” } 

At the moment of its completion, there was promise and threat 
of competing railroads paralleling the Northern Pacific on either 
side. To the north, the Canadian Pacific was hurrying west under 
the driving force of Donald A. Smith, later to become Lord Strath- 
cona. To the south, James J. Hill was maturing his plans for ex- 
tensions of the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba into Mon- 
tana, and across the divide. In 1885 the Canadian Pacific was 
finished. Hill completed the Great Northern in 1893. A north- 
west empire, dependent upon these roads, and spreading the 
granger States, was beginning to take shape.’ 

The southern plains were teeming with railroad gangs between 


1 Eugene V. Smalley, History of the Northern Pacific Railroad (1883), was prepared under 
Villard’s direction, and provides for his line a better history than most railroads possess. 
There is much relevant material in Joseph G. Pyle, Life of James J. Hill (1917); George 
Kennan, E. H. Harriman, a Biography (1922); and Beckles Willson, Life of Lord Strathcona 
and Mount Royal [Donald A. Smith] (1915). 

. 2 There is no adequate biography of any of the promoters of the southwestern continental 
railroads, and the scattered chapters in the writings of Hubert Howe Bancroft remain the 
most trustworthy guide. - 


546 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


1878 and 1884. Before the panic, the Atchison, Topeka, and 
Santa Fé built its track across Kansas, parallel to and south of the 
Kansas Pacific, and the Union Pacific. It now revived and ex- 
panded its activity toward the southwest, while Texas and Cali- 
fornia became breeding ground for railroad projects. 

The group of Californians who first became interested in rail- 
roads through their association with the Central Pacific, held 
together as the only resident group that the Far West produced. 
Most of the lines were absentee owned, and were directed by men 
whose only knowledge of the West was of its capacity to be ex- 
ploited. The Californians, however, clung to their local interests 
with tenacity and success. They procured clauses in the acts of the 
Atlantic and Pacific (1866) and the Texas Pacific (1871) authoriz- 
ing the Southern Pacific of California, which they owned, to build 
east toa junction with each of these continental lines on the east- 
ern boundary of the State of California. Both of these branches 
were finished and ready for business before the main lines reached 
the junction point. Through this, the situation which confronted 
the Northern Pacific at Wallula was repeated. when the successor 
of the Atlantic and Pacific reached the Colorado River at the 
Needles, and when the Texas Pacific, having crossed Texas, ap- 
proached El Paso. The Southern Pacific, indeed, though having 
no continental franchise of its own, was able by its vigor, and its 
branch-line privilege, to dominate both southern lines, and to 
direct them towards a consolidation of railroads. 

The Texas Pacific, halted near Fort Worth by the panic, was 
reorganized and revived about 1878 by Southern Pacific influence. 
The California connecting branch, from San Francisco to Fort 
Yuma on the Colorado, was built between 1865 and 1877, but had 
no hope of continuation eastward except as the Southern Pacific 
interested itself. The legislatures of Arizona and New Mexico, 
and the State of Texas, were accordingly besought for charters, 
under which the Southern Pacific between 1879 and 1882 crossed 
Arizona along the Gila River route, and crossed New Mexico to 
El Paso on the Rio Grande. It even built into Texas some ninety- 
two miles, to Sierra Blanca, at which point it made a connection 
with the Texas Pacific, bound west. In January, 1882, through 
cars were first run from California to St. Louis over this line; in 
October they were run to New Orleans as well. But the comple- 
tion of this only partly satisfied the aspirations of the Southern 
Pacific for connections with the East. 


THE CLOSED FRONTIER 547 


A second Southern Pacific line across Texas and Louisiana from 
Sierra Blanca to New Orleans was made available by February, 
1883, through the purchase and merger of various local lines of 
southern Texas. The population of Texas was not yet strung along 
the route of the Texas Pacific, although cotton farming was caus- 
ing a boom in the country around Fort Worth. The original Texas 
was settled on the San Antonio road, and between it and the Gulf 
of Mexico. The Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio road was 
a local Texas line, started to serve the needs of the country near 
the coast. This and others were merged, new links were built, and 
when the through trains ran into New Orleans in February, 1883, 
they skirted the bend of the Rio Grande, passed through San 
Antonio and Houston, and crossed Louisiana as near the coast as 
the engineers could build the tracks. This was to become the main 
line of the Southern Pacific. 

A third Southern Pacific connection was the product of the 
combined efforts of the western group and the old Atlantic and 
Pacific, reinforced by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé. When 
the Atlantic and Pacific collapsed in 1873, with trackage to Vin- 
ita, Indian Territory, its land-grant seemed likely to be forfeited 
through nonfulfillment. The length of Indian Territory, where 
whites could not lawfully reside, and northern ‘Texas and the pan- 
handle, where the cattle were becoming numerous, did not promise 
a profitable basis for railroad construction. Though it was re- 
organized in 1876 as the St. Louis and San Francisco, reorganiza- 
tion did not instill in it a breath of life until its associates lent their 
aid. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé had by this time fol- 
lowed theold Santa Fé Trail to the Rio Grande, and had descended 
that stream toward El Paso. At Deming, New Mexico, its track 
crossed that of the Southern Pacific. It was now heading deliber- 
ately for Mexico City, through an affiliated line, the Mexican Cen- 
tral, which reached its destination in March, 1884. The unused 
land-grant of the Atlantic and Pacific attracted the attention of 
the Santa Fé managers, in spite of the fact that the time limit had 
expired. Congress was often kind to railroads that needed time 
extensions. It was therefore arranged to enable the construction 
of the section of line from Albuquerque to the Needles, nominally 
under the charter of 1866. The Southern Pacific meanwhile built 
its Mojave branch from Barstow, California, across the desert to 
the Needles. Over this new through line Pullman cars were run: 
ning into St. Louis before the end of 1883. 


548 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


The complex western net of railroads was carried to substantial 
completion in the first half of the decade of the eighties.* Railroad 
mileage was climbing up in relation to population throughout the 
country. In 1860 there were 985 miles per million inhabitants. 
This increased to 1380 miles in 1870; to 1858 miles in 1880; and to 
2625 miles in 1890. Thirty years later the mileage had not yet 
reached 3000 miles per million. The relative changes brought 
about by the abnormal construction of the eighties were largest in 
the Far West, where the Pacific roads were the most extensive 
single accomplishments. The completion of the system was widely 
advertised, for new transportation circuits were of general interest, 
and corporations as large as the Northern or Southern Pacific were 
novelties. The latter system of lines attained additional promi- 
nence for itself when its owners brought the various corporate 
components into orderly relation with each other. 

There was an intricate network of contracts, through which the 
California magnates controlled and built the Central Pacific, and 
the various Southern Pacific roads. There were other feeder lines 
that were controlled by one or another of the group. In 1884 the 
State of Kentucky was prevailed upon to incorporate the Southern 
Pacific Railroad Company, for whose stock the various members 
of the California group exchanged their holdings in the several 
roads. New unity in management was thus gained, permanence 
was secured, and the fact that the holding company was a creation 
of a State in which none of its lines were operated gave promise 
of lack of legislative interference. State governments were be- 
coming more interested in railroad affairs, since the granger cases 
had upheld their right to regulate, and even Congress was rapidly 
approaching a time when it must exert an influence in the name of 
the United States. In Novenber, 1883, most of the railroads, by 
common agreement, took one significant step toward their adjust- 
ment as a national system; they agreed to adopt a system of time 
zones within which one standard should be used by every road. 
This abolished at a stroke much of the confusion that had hitherto 
attended long-distance travel, and pointed to the fact that the rail- 
roads were becoming one problem for the Nation, rather than 
thirty-eight problems for as many States. 

As the continental railroads opened their lines they brought 
within easy reach every considerable section of the Far West, and 


3 FB. L. Paxson, “The Pacific Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier i in Amer« 
ica,’ in American Historical Association Report (1907).: 


THE CLOSED FRONTIER 549 


abolished the isolation that had thus far been a characteristic of 
the American frontier. They bore heavily upon the open frontier 
in another way through their stimulation of sales of the public 
lands, and their wide advertisement of the resources of the West. 
It was still the basic task of the frontier farmer to secure his farm. 
Hitherto he had in practice been limited in his selection to the zone 
of public domain adjacent to the established agricultural frontier. 
He could now penetrate to every part of the West, and thus with 
better access, and wider publicity, the process of divesting the 
United States of title was pushed ahead. 

There were many ways in which the migrant of the eighties 
could procure his farm.* He could still buy it outright under the 
Preémption Act of 1841. In spite of repeated urging from the 
General Land Office, Congress failed to repeal this law when it 
was made needless by the Homestead Act of 1862. This latter act 
was best known of all the land laws, and the attractive invitation 
to go west and receive a free farm from the United States was 
heard around the world. During 1883, original homestead entries 
were made by 56,565 persons, making a total of such entries since 
the law enacted of 608,677. The picture of more than half a million 
free families cultivating the domain was inspiring — but untrue. 
Only a third as many, 213,486 had completed the terms of resi- 
dence and cultivation required by law and received their final en- 
try from the Land Office. The Homestead Act was a telling ad- 
vertisement, but many prospective homesteaders decided that it 
was better to buy the farm outright, commuting it under the Pre- 
emption Act, as was permissible. Many others, who reached the 
frontier under the lure of the Homestead Act, decided to buy rail- 
road lands, out of the generous land-grants, or school lands from 
one of the States. But the various ways of obtaining lands met 
the needs of the different types of farmer headed west, and no one 
need cavil at the statement of Donaldson in The Public Domain 
(1884), that the Homestead Act “stands as the concentrated wis- 
dom of legislation for the settlement of the public lands. It pro- 
tects the Government, it fills the States with homes, it builds up 
communities, and lessens the chances of social and civil disorder 
by giving ownership of the soil, in small tracts, to the occupants 


4 The earliest systematic sketch of our land system was left to be done by a Japanese 
student, Shosuke Sato, ‘‘History of the Land Question in the United States,” in Johns 
Hopkins University Studies, vol. 1v; Albert Bushnell Hart wrote one of his earliest mono- 

- graphs on “‘The Disposition of our Public Lands,” for vol. 1 of Quarterly Journal of Econome 
ics. They have not had adequate successors. ” 


THE TWO FRONTIERS IN 1890 
argins of 6 per Square Mile. 
\ 





SS 
RECESSION of the FRONTIER, 1890-1900SSA 


The shaded lines indicate eastern and western 
margins of the solid areas of six or more inhab- 

| itants per square mile. Isolated frontier groups 
of this density are omitted. The outlines of Colo- 
rado are shown to aid the eye. Since 1890 there 
has been a considerable drift of rural population 
into cities, and the high plains in many regions 
have never regained their density of 1890, 


THE TWO FRONTIERS IN 1900 
Margins of 6 per Square Mile. 


COLORADO 





THE CLOSED FRONTIER 551 


thereof. It was copied from no other nation’s system. It was origi- 
nally and distinctively America, and remains a monument to its 
originators.” 

If the land laws had met the other needs for soil as well as they 
met those of the small frontier farmer, the history of the tenth 
decade under the Constitution would have been more orderly and 
satisfying than it was. They failed, however, to protect the public 
interest in mineral rights, or water powers, or irrigation projects, 
and they provided no legal method whereby the legitimate whole- 
sale user of land could obtain his need. Much of the country 
brought within reach by the railroads was mountainous, and with- 
out appreciable value; much was useful only for its timber; much 
had only a grazing value; yet the law treated it all as though it 
were destined to cultivation by the small farmer. 

The cattle companies were the most conspicuous sinners against 
the spirit and letter of the law. Timber was not yet scarce enough 
in the United States for there to be much concern at the mounting 
forest holdings that certain groups of speculators were bringing 
together; and low-grade coal lands, which abounded in the domain, 
or oil fields whose value was not yet appreciated, failed to stimu- 
late public interest. But the cattle barons trod on their neighbors’ 
toes, destroyed the lesser cow men, and forced their law-breaking 
to the attention of the country. 

There was no objection to the use of Government grass upon 
the open range, so long as the country was not needed; but the 
cattle industry required large enclosures, to safeguard the stock 
as well as to lower the cost of cattle tending. The need was for 
acres by the thousand, or ten thousand; whereas the law issued it 
in sections and fractions thereof. The real requirement of the 
rancher for a large tract that he could control, the cheapness with 
which he could fence it with barbed wire, the public opinion of the 
locality which did not discourage such seizure of the public domain, 
and the laxity of Congress which would not appropriate enough 
money to permit of areal police and inspection of the public pro- 
perty, all contributed to the multiplication of illegal inclosures. 
These were to be found by 1885 everywhere when the cattle ap- 
peared in numbers; they were most numerous on the northern 
plains, in Nebraska and Montana, near to the shipping points on 
the continental railroads. The technique of the fencer began usu- 
ally with the lawful acquisition of title to a small tract of land. 
By homesteading, preémption, or purchase otherwise, he secured 


552 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


a tract following the meanderings of some stream suitable for 
watering the stock. Without such water right, securely possessed, 
it was unsafe to venture upon the business. When, however, he 
had gained title to both banks of a stream for several miles, his 
possession made it impossible for any other rancher to get to the 
water, or to use the dry grazing grounds on either side of the 
stream. The rancher often enlarged his owned holdings by re- 
quiring his employees to enter homesteads or preémptions, and 
transfer them to him. This was strictly illegal, for the law ful- 
minated against collusive entries, and insisted that personal use 
alone warranted either homestead or preémption; but there was 
no machinery to enforce the law, and no local opinion to warrant 
enforcement. 

There never had been a time when the frontier concerned itself 
with the maintenance of the common rights over the domain. The 
Government had more generally been regarded as a somewhat 
impertinent outsider who thrust barriers between the citizen and 
the land he wanted. On this last frontier, the prospective home- 
steader complained when he found that the cattle man had il- 
legally enclosed trails, water rights, and pasturage that the home- 
steader might have used; but events were moving too rapidly for 
this feeling to acquire political weight. It was easier to direct 
public attention to railroad encroachments, for the land-grant 
railroads owned a large acreage which they held for occupation. 
In many cases the roads had failed to be completed on time, and 
the grants had become void, or at least voidable. The Commis- 
sioners of the Land Office early brought this status to the notice 
of Congress. The question arose whether public land withdrawn 
from entry on the filing of a railroad plat should return auto- 
matically to entry when the time limit expired without fulfillment; 
or whether, as the roads insisted, it required a special act of Con- 
gress to bring this about. If forfeit for noncompliance, the ques- 
tions appeared as to what should be forfeit — the whole grant to 
the railroad, or the lands opposite the sections not finished on 
time, or only those not finished at all. It was a matter of complex 
business, whose equities worried successive Secretaries of the In- 
terior, and had political implications that made it impossible more 
than to approximate justice. It was at least a triumph of na- 
tional policy that the whole grants to the Texas Pacific were 
canceled for cause, and remained canceled in spite of the active 
and efficient lobby of the Southern Pacific, which wanted to 
receive them as assignee. 


THE CLOSED FRONTIER 553 


The difficulties of administering the General Land Office in the 
face of such a migration as was now under way were great. They 
were alleviated by the fact that the task was nearing its end. The 
population map of 1880, as shown by the census report, revealed 
the fact that the best farm lands of the public domain were all 
disposed of, and that recent entries were carrying the farmers dan- 
gerously close to the sub-humid plains and the high mountains. 
‘There was room for some further advance before 1890, but not 
much. At every census since the first in 1790 the line of six in- 
habitants per square mile had shifted west, forming a positive 
measure for the advance of the frontier. The line of 1890 was so 
broken and irregular, and approached so near, at various places, 
to the western line that was swinging east, that obviously the 
frontier task was done. In 1900, indeed, the line shows an ab- 
solute recession. The migrations of the eighties were over-large; 
and the enthusiasm of the settlers, recruited by alien immigrants, 
and stimulated by lenders with money to advance on farms, and 
railroads with lands to sell, planted more farmer families on the 
western plains than the plains could hold. Between 1880 and 1890 
the typical American frontier process reached its end. 


CHAPTER LVIII 
THE ADMISSION OF THE “OMNIBUS” STATES 


In the period of depression after the panic of 1873, Colorado, the 
thirty-eighth State, was admitted to the Unionin 1876. It brought 
no change in the boundaries upon the political map of the United 
States, for these lines had become substantially complete after 
the organization of Wyoming Territory in 1868. It established, 
however, a western status that remained unchanged for thir- 
teen years, until new States had ripened under the boom of the 
eighties. 

During these thirteen years approximately two thirds of the to- 
tal area of the United States lay under autonomous State govern- 
ments, and one third was dependent upon the will of Congress. 
Of the total area, 3,026,789 square miles, the eight territories of 
Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, Utah, Arizona, 
and New Mexico, and Indian Territory which last was not a ter- 
ritory at all, comprised 938,015 square miles. They occupied an 
unbroken tract from Canada to Mexico, and varied in breadth 
from nearly twenty-seven degrees of longitude along the Canadian 
line to five degrees at the narrowest part, Utah. Their region had 
much of it been included in the legendary American desert, or 
the Indian Country. Their first institutions of government had 
mostly originated in the demand of mining camps for home rule. 
The oldest of them, New Mexico and Utah, had rounded over a 
quarter century since their creation; the newest, Wyoming, was 
still in its first decade. All of them bore testimony to the fact that 
while mineral resources were capable of inspiring territorial talk 
they rarely provided a sound basis for civil organization unless 
supplemented by extensive agriculture. The white population, 
150,220 in 1860, had grown to 271,166 in 1870, and to 606,810 in 
1880. Ten years later, with the inclusion of most of the 325,464 
Indians which were now enumerated, the gross population of the 
area was 1,908,803. 

The three States of Kansas,! Nebraska, and Colorado shared 


1 William E. Connelley, The Life of Preston B. Plumb, 1837-1891 (1913) and Ingalls 
of Kansas (1909), pictures through the lives of two senators “the founding of a great State,” 
and the “passing of an old order.’’ Plumb was so typical that William H. Crane copied him 


THE ADMISSION OF THE OMNIBUS STATES 555 


with the territorial area in many of its characteristics. They were 
set up in the undulating plains that rise gradually from the Mis- 
souri River to the watershed of the Rockies. In 1860 their pop- 
ulation of 170,324 had been close to that of the territorial area; 
but with the earlier influence of the continental railroads bearing 
upon them, and their closer proximity to eastern sources of emi- 
gration, they grew to 527,256 by 1870. In 1880 they had far out- 
stripped the territorial area, having 1,642,825 inhabitants; and in 
1890 this was increased to 2,904,013. They possessed home rule, 
which gave them greater political influence than their territorial 
neighbors, but their social age was about the same and their dif- 
ference was that of greater size rather than of inherent quality. 
There was no new State admitted after Nebraska (1867) until 
Colorado (1876); and political considerations as well as imma- 
turity had much to do with the long interval after Colorado until 
the next admissions in 1889. 

Colorado limped and lingered in its advance toward statehood. 
Under its first enabling act it rejected admission in 1864. When 
it thought better of it, and approved admission the following year, 
the President of the United States had changed from Lincoln to 
Johnson, and presidential policy had also changed. Johnson did 
not want additional Republican States and found excellent reasons 
for refusing to admit Colorado with its scanty population, its 
vagrant habits, and its low taxable wealth. After the completion 
of the Union Pacific and its Kansas Pacific branch, agriculture 
awoke on the eastern slopes of the mountains, and the tributaries 
of the South Platte and the Arkansas yielded water for irrigation 
ditches that induced a more permanent prosperity than Colorado 
Territory had yet witnessed. Thereafter another enabling act 
came easily in 1875, and a constitution was framed at Denver in 
1876. 

The second Colorado enabling act was passed on the last day 
upon which the Republican party had a majority in Congress for 
a period of six years. Beginning with March 4, 1875, Grant was 
confronted with a Democratic House of Representatives, including 
a Democratic delegate from Colorado Territory. The opposition 
developed hopes that from Colorado might come three Democratic 
electoral votes in 1876, and Patterson, the delegate, encouraged 
this belief. But the new State was admitted by proclamation on 


in every detail in his make-up and manner in The Senator, and Plumb himself trimmed the 
actor’s beard to make the resemblance more complete. 


556 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


August 1, 1876, and cast its vote for Rutherford B. Hayes the 
following November; without these three, or with them reversed, 
Samuel J. Tilden would have become President of the United — 
States. It was small wonder that in ensuing Congresses, members 
of both parties looked upon new States with reference to their 
influence upon presidential aspirations, and that Democrats re- 
solved not to increase the burden of votes that might be cast 
against them. Throughout the administration of Hayes, 1877-— 
1881, there was continuously a Democratic House of Represent- 
atives to block the admission of Republican territories as States, 
and after an intermission of a single Congress, the blockade lasted 
until the end of the Fiftieth Congress in 1889. During the four 
years of Cleveland’s administration, 1885-1889, the blockade was 
from the other side, with a Republican Senate suspicious of every 
statehood proposition that might turn out Democratic. 

After Colorado, the likeliest territories were Dakota and Wash- 
ington, each of which had the beginnings of a solvent population. 
The massacre of Custer and his men in 1876 drew attention to 
Dakota and its resources. In the southwest corner of the terri- 
tory, the region of the Black Hills was filling in with mineral pro- 
spectors, and the stage coach running north from Cheyenne on the 
Union Pacific to Deadwood kept alive a tradition that had largely 
died after the overland stage was withdrawn. When Colonel 
William F. Cody organized his first Wild West show in 1883 he 
capitalized the general interest in the cow country and the mining 
camps, and made the attack upon the Deadwood coach a spectac- 
ular feature of his performance. When he took his show to Eng- 
land in 1887, royalty was more intrigued by this than by any other 
episode, and his autobiography tells many stories of the expe- 
riences of “‘Buffalo Bill’? when he held the reins, and the then 
Prince of Wales insisted upon riding around the arena on the box. 

The Black Hills brought advertising to a remote part of Dakota, 
and suggested an ultimate division of the territory. There were 
already two clearly defined tracts, one in the northeast, where the 
wheat lands of the Red River of the North were tapped by the 
Northern Pacific Railroad, the other in the southeast, where 
farmers from Iowa and Minnesota had naturally overflowed from 
these States and occupied the angle between the Missouri and the 
Big Sioux rivers. When James Bryce traversed this territory 
with Villard’s ceremonial train in 1883, he witnessed the laying of 
a corner stone for a new capitol building at Bismarck, where there 


THE ADMISSION OF THE OMNIBUS STATES 557 


were hopes rather than inhabitants. “The confidence of these 
Westerns is superb,”’ he wrote. “Men seem to live in the future 
rather than in the present: not that they fail to work while it is 
called to-day, but that they see the country not merely as it is, but 
as it will be, twenty, fifty, a hundred years hence, when the seed- 
lings shall have grown to be forest trees.”? The starting of a capitol 
at Bismarck was evidence that in Dakota the intention was to 
enter the Union as two States. Universities were established at 
both Grand Forks, on Red River, and Vermilion, on the Missouri, 
so that institutions might be ready for each half when the division 
came. 

Bills for the admission of Dakota were before Congress during 
the session of 1882-1883, but failed to pass. The defeat was due to 
Democratic opposition, reinforced by a vigorous protest from a 
group of Republicans. The Republican protest was founded upon 
the fact that Yankton County had made no provision for the 
payment of its issue of railroad bonds, whose holders sought to 
compel payment by exclusion. “I believe that all the objections 
which have been hitherto urged against the passage of that bill 
are purely partisan and malignant,’’ declared John J. Ingalls, 
Republican Senator from Kansas; and he knew much of both 
partisanship and malignancy. With the defeat of this measure, 
the moment of possible admission was passed, and there was no 
chance for success until after the election of 1888. 

In Dakota spontaneous attempts at statehood kept aspirations 
alive through the years of partisan blockade. A constitution was 
drawn up at Sioux Falls in 1883, and another at the same place in 
1885. The United States Senate, which was Republican, re- 
peatedly passed enabling acts for the division of the territory and 
the admission of its parts. The House as consistently rejected the 
proposals, searching for arguments in the size of the population 
and the allegation that division was a measure being forced upon 
an unwilling northern half of the territory. In 1888 the Senate 
again had under consideration a division-admission bill, with no 
hope of passing it through the House, when the result of the pres- 
idential election disclosed the fact that after March 4, 1889, the 
Government of the United States would be Republican in all its 
branches. This removed the blockade. The question now im- 
mediately became not whether Dakota could be admitted, but 
how many other territories would be admitted with it. 

Washington Territory had a local statehood movement in 1878, 


558 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


at the moment when the renewal of active building on the North- 
ern Pacific gave promise of a brightened future. The convention 
sat at Walla Walla, for most of the people were yet in the south- - 
east corner of the territory, near the Columbia River. The Puget 
Sound country and the Spokane country were somewhat later in 
their development. To the Walla Walla convention it seemed 
reasonable that upon admission Washington should be enlarged. 
It had become evident that so much of Idaho as lay north of the 
Salmon River was attached to Washington by much closer ties 
than those that bound it to the southern portion of itself. Lewis- 
ton desired to be in Washington. In 1887 a bill annexing this 
Idaho panhandle to Washington got so far as to pass Congress, to 
be defeated by the pocket veto of President Cleveland. But the 
Territory of Washington was still a territory in 1887, nine years 
after framing its constitution. The blockade kept it out. 

Between Dakota at the east, and Washington at the west, the 
line of the Northern Pacific brought the northern half of the ter- 
ritorial area into easy access. Montana and Idaho were both 
crossed by its track. Wyoming lay south, but was close enough 
to be affected. The cattle that traveled up the long trail, across 
eastern Wyoming where Red Cloud made his successful stand in 
1868, passed naturally down the Powder River and the Big Horn 
to the Yellowstone Valley, and thence found shipment east from 
Miles City and Glendive. The searching pen of Owen Wister has 
preserved the picture of the Wyoming of this period. His Virgin- 
van (1902) is among the most real of American heroes, and is one 
of the most accurate of our historical portraitures. But Wyoming 
was a thoroughfare rather than a destination, and its scanty 
population (62,555 in 1890) left it without real right to immediate 
statehood. Idaho, a little more populous than Wyoming (88,548 
in 1890) had a similar situation. 

Montana was somewhat further advanced than Idaho or Wy- 
oming, and profited by the publicity given it by the Coeur d’Alene 
mining rush of 1883-1884, and by the growing enclosures of the 
stockmen. Its people held a convention at Helena, in 1884, under 
the presidency of William A. Clark, and memorialized Congress 
for immediate statehood, without result. They received an un- 
usual favor from President Cleveland, however, when he ap- 
pointed as territorial governor in 1885 one of their own citizens, 
Samuel T. Hauser. 

Carpet-bagging was a usual feature of the territorial govern- 


THE ADMISSION OF THE OMNIBUS STATES 559 


ments. At a time when most of the appointive offices were used to 
reward party services, it was too much to expect that officials in 
the Indian service, or territorial, should be selected upon any 
better basis. Within the States most of the Federal appointees had 
at least the virtue of residence in the communities in which they 
served, for every President had political bills to pay, or hopes 
to advance, in every constituency. But the territories had no 
presidential votes to cast, and no influence to fear or favor. They 
were like the reconstruction governments of the post-bellum 
South. The political carpet-baggers of the territories could do 
less damage than those of the southern States, for they had smaller 
communities to operate upon, and much less money to spend, but 
in principle they were generally as un-representative. The “con- 
sent of the governed,”’ which meant much to most Americans on 
the Fourth of July, meant little to them when it came to the ter- 
ritorial Americans subject to their discretion. The political ap- 
pointees of the territories were liable to become a statehood ring, 
- lobbying for admission, and intriguing for the elective jobs. In 
most of the territories it is difficult to separate their ambitions 
from the genuine aspiration of the population for statehood. 

Quite as characteristic of the far western territories as their 
carpet-bagging governments was their somewhat lawless reign of 
law.? The institutions of settled society came irregularly into the 
open territories where population was sparse and included a 
heavy percentage of drifters. In the older territories the farmer 
population spread definitely and permanently across the fields 
There was at once a settled group, tied up with the future of the 
region, possessing homes and property, and forming the basis of 
orderly government. But with the rise of the mining camps it 
was apparent that this frontier must develop in a new way, and 
that order was to be an acquired characteristic, difficult of attain- 
ment. 

The lawlessness of the mining camp and the cow town received 
wide notoriety, and was turned to literary uses by Bret Harte and 
Mark Twain.’ Self-help lasted in these regions longer than on the 
agricultural frontiers, for the good reason that unless self-help was 
immediately available at need, it might be too late for any help. 
The men, good and bad, went armed, and the bad man had every 


_ 2Thomas J. Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana, or, Popular Justice in the Rocky 
Mountains (2d ed., 1882). 
3 Charles H. Shinn, Mining Camps. A Study in American Frontier Government (1885). 


560 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


advantage in the earlier phases of far western life. In every com- 
munity, however, there came a time when local opinion asserted 
itself, often with catastrophic outcome. The vigilance committee 
made a formal appearance upon the mining frontier as early as the 
first decade in California, with good citizens organizing as vol- 
unteers to suppress the bad. The justice thus rendered was of 
necessity summary and abrupt, and sometimes indiscriminate. 
But the stabler portion of a community was confronted with a 
real dilemma when it had to choose between longer tolerating 
murder or worse and taking the law into its own hands. A few 
sessions of the vigilance committee were likely to pave the way 
for the inauguration of a reign of law. 

When the election of 1888 was followed by the last session of 
the Fiftieth Congress, in which for the last time the Democrats 
possessed a majority in the House of Representatives, there was 
great activity among the statehood advocates. The Dakota bill, 
which had passed the Senate at the previous session, was before the 
House; the majority of the latter now determined to yield, and by 
yielding to acquire something for itself. “If these territories be 
not admitted this session,” declared one of the Democratic 
leaders, “they will surely be admitted under Republican auspices 
in the next Congress.’” The Dakota bill was therefore reported out, 
but amended to “‘omnibus”’ proportions by the addition of Wash- 
ington and Montana, and by New Mexico, which was expected 
to be Democratic. It was taken for granted that the northern ter- 
ritories, first settled during the Civil War, and long officered by Re- 
publican appointees, would enter as Republicans. 

The lifted blockade, which was apparent to the Democrats of 
the House, was as apparent to the Republicans of the Senate. Al- 
though they had long scolded the Democratic wickedness that 
excluded Republican States, they had no mind to admit any 
Democratic States themselves. The Senate received back its 
amended bill, and amended it again, striking out New Mexico, and 
dividing Dakota, leaving the bill with still four territories in the 
“omnibus.” Twice the bills were sent into the committee on con- 
ference before an agreement could be reached on terms satisfactory 
to the victorious Republicans. The House gave up the now un- 
equal fight, and Cleveland, on February 22, 1889, signed the Om- 
nibus Bill for the admission of four new States. 

In the summer of 1889 the Far West was noisy with its con- 
stitutional eloquence. The Omnibus Bill provided that cons 


THE ADMISSION OF THE OMNIBUS STATES 561 


ventions should meet, to frame constitutions, or to revise those 
that had been made spontaneously.‘ In South Dakota the Sioux 
Falls constitution of 1885 wasrevamped. In North Dakota, Mon- 
tana, and Washington new ones were put together. In Idaho and 
Wyoming, where there was no authority at all, conventions met 
at Boise and Cheyenne and framed documents similar to those of 
the four enabled States. At Santa Fé, New Mexicans gathered 
and did likewise, At Salt Lake City there was no special con- 
stitutional movement, for Utah had been continuously aspirant 
for forty years. But within the Mormon Church a change was 
taking place, and the following spring it was revealed to the mem- 
bers of the church that a belief in the doctrine of plural marriage 
was not necessary to salvation. This, for Utah, had become a con- 
dition precedent. 

The terms of the Omnibus Bill required that the several con- 
ventions should frame constitutions along certain lines. There 
was still, and ever had been, doubt as to the constitutional right 
of Congress to set terms for the admission of a State. In the 
United States Constitution it is simply stated that “‘New States 
may be admitted by the Congress into this Union,” and the law 
is clear that, once in the Union, there is no difference among the 
States, they being equally free and equally dependent. Advo- 
cates of complete States rights maintained that Congress had no 
concern except to see that a republican form of government was 
erected by a State constitution. Advocates of restriction held 
that since no power could compel Congress to admit any State, 
and since none could enter the Union without Congressional per- 
mission, Congress thus acquired a discretionary power that it 
could exercise according to its pleasure. Whatever the law, Con- 
gress was beyond control, and whatever injustice might be com- 
plained of, there was no means of enforcing redress. 

Missouri learned this fact when the constitution of 1820 for- 
bade the entrance of free negroes into the State, and Congress 
refused to permit the State to function until this prohibition was 
interpreted away. There was no means of controlling the action 
of a State once in the Union; until admission it had a master in 
Congress that it must respect. The precedents of the Civil War 
period enhanced the importance of the strategic position of Con- 
gress. It was discovered that the sort of power claimed by Con- 


‘John D. Hicks, “The Constitutions of the Northwest States,” in University of Ne- 
braska, University Studies, vol. xxX1IL i 


562 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


gress as a whole could be used by either House, since each, under 
the Federal Constitution, is sole judge of the elections, returns, 
and qualifications of its own members, and has actual power to . 
exclude or expel. The Confederate States were not permitted to 
resume their functions in the Union until they submitted to a long 
series of exactions set for them by the victorious Congress. Some 
of these were internal, which they might have amended away after. 
readmission; others were permanent in consequence, such as the 
requirement to ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amend- 
ments. When Nebraska was admitted, shortly after the Civil War, 
Congress followed the same procedure, stated terms of entrance, 
and directed the President to examine the constitution of the new 
State, and to admit it by proclamation upon satisfying himself 
that the requirements of Congress were fully complied with. 

Colorado was similarly admitted in 1876, under a law passed 
in 1875. On this occasion an attempt was made to test the va- 
lidity of admission by proclamation, on the ground that Con- 
gress had no right to delegate to another agent the power to admit 
a State. The protest had a real meaning, when the Democrats in 
the House contested the seat of the first Republican congressman- 
elect from Colorado in 1877. If the contest could be made effect- 
ive, it would tend to establish the fact that Colorado was still not 
a State, that its electoral vote of 1876 ought therefore not to be 
counted, that Rutherford B. Hayes ought to be deprived of the 
three Colorado votes, and that without these he would lack a ma- 
jority and be forced to vacate his office. It was an ambitious 
program, which collapsed when the House seated the Republican 
member. 

The Omnibus Bill, in section four, required certain “‘irrevoca- 
ble” pledges of the new States: (1) that there should be perfect tol- 
eration of religious sentiment, (2) that claim to public lands and 
tribal lands should be expressly renounced, and that taxes should 
not fall heavier upon lands owned by citizens of other States than 
upon those owned by resident citizens, (3) that territorial debts 
and liabilities should be assumed and paid, that (4) systems of 
public schools should be provided “free from sectarian control,” 
(5) that the constitutions should be republican in form, that (6) 
they should make no distinction “in civil or political rights on 
account of race or color, except as to Indians not taxed,” and that 
(7) the constitutions should not be repugnant to the Declaration 
af Independence and the Constitution of the United States. There 


THE ADMISSION OF THE OMNIBUS STATES 563 


was no difficulty in obtaining compliance under all these heads. 
In addition, the new constitutions were made a catalogue of the 
new ideas of government and control that had survived the Civil 
War and blossomed amid the economic changes of the eighties. 

The great length of the new documents was one of the most 
visible facts. Increasingly the constitutions were recording the 
distrust which Americans were coming to feel towards their own 
governments. Every constitution was clearer upon the things that 
the legislatures could not do than upon the ends to be attained by 
legislation. There were long clauses to prevent the granting of 
favors to corporations, banks, or railroads; there were sections 
reflecting the experiences of the granger movement, and asserting 
the public right over common carriers. There was the usual man- 
hood suffrage, and in one of the new constitutions of 1889, that of 
Wyoming, there was woman suffrage as well. The constitutions 
approximated codes rather than organic laws, and there was a 
costly paradox in that they showed an intent to develop programs 
of State action, yet drew iron-clad restrictions to make such pro- 
grams ineffective. 

Early in November, 1889, President Harrison issued a series 
of proclamations admitting the four States of the Omnibus Bill; 
their Senators and Congressmen, all Republican, took their seats 
when the Fifty-first Congress met the following month.> The 
exigencies of the party contributed to the success which was ac- 
corded by this Congress to two of the territories that had been 
left outside the Omnibus Bill, yet desired statehood. It was in this 
session that Thomas B. Reed, of Maine, earned the title of “‘Czar”’ 
by his courageous career as Speaker of the House; and it was only 
by a stern party administration that a majority was held together 
to support his rules. In the Senate there was a fairly easy situ- 
ation, but every member was needed every day in the House. The 
five new Republicans of the Omnibus States were useful to their 
party. Two more from Wyoming and Idaho were added in the 
summer of 1890. On the merits of the case, both States might 
easily have been excluded, but the party needed votes, and Con- 
gress was fatigued by the long wrangle over admission of terri- 
tories, that had been heard for more than ten years. New Mexico, 
with Democratic tendencies, was indeed rejected; Arizona was 
impossible; Utah had seen the light, but had not yet been per- 
mitted to make a constitution. 


5 F, L. Paxson, “‘The Admission of the Omnibus States,” in State Historical Society of 
Wisconsin, Proceedings, 1911. 


CHAPTER LIX 
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRONTIER 


Wit the admission of the Omnibus States, and the two others. 
that trailed into the Union after them, the work begun by the old 
Congress of the Confederacy was substantially completed. The 
thirteen original States were supplemented by thirty-one that had 
been admitted to the Union. The forty-four that now constituted 
the United States embraced in their territory not only all that the 
founders had ever dreamed of, but much that had been willingly 
conceded to the desert. The huge territorial area of 1876 was for- 
ever broken up. Never in so short a time had so large an area 
been at one stroke lifted to statehood, nor so many States been 
added, as these six that entered the Union in less than nine months. 
The process that is fundamental in the American empire, and that 
marks it as different from any of its predecessors, was nearly 
worked out. 

The American process, outlined in the legislation of the Con- 
tinental Congress in the Ordinances of 1784 and 1787, contem- 
plated a motherland and dependent colonies, like any other em- 
pire; but differed from others in the promise that dependency was 
a temporary status, to be terminated by the transition from social 
adolescence to adult stature, and to be marked then by full ad- 
mission to all the privileges of the nation. The spirit of freedom 
and progress, encouraged by frontier conditions, gave rise to this 
new theory of imperialism. The United States never seriously 
wavered in its adherence to it. The Ordinance of 1787, in all its 
fundamentals, was as effective in the admission of Wyoming or 
Idaho as in that of Vermont or Ohio. It was never necessary to 
revise its principles. Congress had modified details as the years 
rolled on, but had left the substance intact. 

Perhaps one of the reasons why the pledge of 1787 continued to 
bind was the fact that the American Federal Government did not 
develop a governing caste, or a colonial office. The plague of the 
spoils system was the horde of inefficient placemen who abused the 
territories; its salvation was their inefficiency and impermanence. 
If American conditions had bred at Washington a colonial office 
like that of England, the normal tendency of an effective bureau- 


THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRONTIER — 565 


cracy might well have been to block the development of States 
and to induce a reinforced conviction that territories were not yet 
ready for admission. But thereis no evidence that a policy was ever 
developed for the government of the territories. Their officers 
were given their commissions, generally to reward political serv- 
ices. They were then turned loose, subject only to the restrictions 
that the courts and the appropriation bills might place upon their 
conduct. The President was too busy to interest himself in their 
affairs. The State Department had no agencies of control. The 
Indian Bureau, the Land Office, and the War Department all ex- 
ercised some concurrent jurisdiction with the territorial officers, 
and there was some interlocking of functions, but no American 
ever made a reputation founded upon his knowledge of terri- 
torial affairs, and his success in administering them. When the 
Spanish War resulted in transferring detached colonies to the con- 
trol of the United States there was no going establishment ready 
to receive them, despite the fact that in a century the country had 
raised forty-two governments from dependent status to full par- 
ticipation. It became necessary to attach the island colonies to a 
bureau in the War Department, unhappily so efficient as to pre- 
clude any early granting of full autonomy. 

In the course of admitting the new States Congress devised 
mechanisms for giving effect to the policy of the legislation of 1787. 
Statehood was never forced upon any community although it was 
sometimes, as in the case of Nevada, offered in so tempting a fash- 
ion as to accelerate the movement. Colorado declined the offer of 
1864, as did Nebraska, and upon several occasions territories re- 
fused to accept the first terms offered them by Congress. Iowa 
rejected admission upon the first terms because of the boundary 
involved. Arizona and New Mexico declined joint admission in 
1906. 

The pressure was more commonly the other way, with terri- 
tories demanding admission earlier than Congress was ready to 
accord it. The first three new States, Vermont, Kentucky, and 
Tennessee were hardly to be regarded as creations of the United 
States, for all had been formed prior to the Constitution. They 
were unfinished business of the Revolution. But Ohio, the first 
State to be guided through all the preliminaries by Congress, was 
the occasion for the passage of the earliest of the enabling acts, 
whereby Congress kept its control over the details of the state- 
hood process. The enabling acts gave formal authority to pro- 


566 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


ceed, fixed the qualifications of voters and shaped the conventions, 
and dictated the further terms to be complied with before admis- 


sion. Of the thirty-one States added to the Union since Ohio, . 


more than half, eighteen, have operated under enabling acts; and 
of the thirteen not enabled, two already possessed statehood before 
their independent admission and one was a free republic. ‘These 


were Maine (a part of Massachusetts), West Virginia (a part of 


Virginia), and Texas. The virtue of the enabling policy, from the 
standpoint of Congress, was the vantage it gave for determining 
in advance of admission the full compliance of the State with 
policies of the Government of the United States. The political 
theorists of some of the States have engaged at times in the prof- 
itless discussion as to whether it is the act of Congress that creates 
the State, or the act of the people in framing and ratifying the con- 
stitution. The impossibility of an American State existing outside 
the Constitution and continuing to be American, makes the date 
set by Congress for admission the one of practical significance, 
however much the people may believe that they have become a 
State at any earlier time. | 

The growth and spread of democracy have been revealed not 
only in the content of the State constitutions, but in the method 
in which they have come into effect. The first revolutionary con- 
stitutions were often framed by the legislatures which had seized 
full authority, and which declared the basic laws to be operative 
without further sanction. By the date of the Philadelphia Con- 
vention, in 1787, it had come to be believed that a legislative body 
chosen under an old basic law was incompetent to form a new 
constitution, and that a special convention chosen by the people 
for this purpose was indispensable. But it was accepted in theory 
that when such a convention met it embodied the full sovereignty 
of the people, could perform legislative as well as constituent 
functions, and could not only construct a new constitution, but 
promulgate it and give it force. The earlier new States were ad- 
mitted under constitutions thus promulgated, and the radical 
democrats of the age of Jefferson saw nothing inconsistent with 
their democracy in this assumption of power by a constitutional 
convention. The Mississippi convention of 1817, for reasons which 
have not been clearly established, broke from this practice, and 
submitted its constituticen to a referendum by the people, whicb 
referendum gave it validity. The new method was in close accord 
with the democratic ideas of the Jacksonian period, and soon be- 


: a 


THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRONTIER = 567 


came general. Five subsequent States adhered to the old process, 
Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida, but all the rest 
preferred to submit the constitution to popular ratification. [li- 
nois was the only northern State after Mississippi to promulgate 
an original constitution. The same procedure was extended to the 
ratification of amendments and to most of the new constitutions 
that the States made as they outgrew their original constitutional 
garments. 

The earlier habit of Congress was to await the action of the ter- 

ritory under the enabling act and to pass a law admitting the 
State after the presentation of a constitution. Missouri was an 
exception to this, for the ultimate admission of that State de- 
pended upon an examination of the degree of its compliance with 
terms that Congress set. The President admitted it by procla- 
mation. There was a similar provision in the case of Nevada, and 
thereafter admission by proclamation became a general rule, 
broken only by Wyoming and Idaho whose completed consti- 
tutions Congress accepted without further action. In the case of 
Arizona this method of admission was complicated because the 
President of the United States objected to a provision of its con- 
stitution, and declined to exercise his power to admit the State. 
The natural result of the frequent repetition of the steps in making 
and admitting new States was to keep alive a familiarity with con- 
stitutional matters, and to engender among the people the habit 
of self-government. 

After 1890 there were four additional States to be anticipated, 
and only four. None of these was to be the orderly result of 
frontier advance, and each was to be admitted in its own time and 
in its own way. Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona were territories, 
unripe or unfit for immediate action; Oklahoma was a new cre- 
ation of the year in which the Omnibus States were formed. 

Oklahoma was given the usual territorial form of organization in 
1890 after a dozen years of active contest over the future of the 
Indian Country. Thrust in between Texas and Arkansas, this was 
the southern tip of the tract which, by Monroe’s Indian policy 
had been forever devoted to Indian occupancy. The Indian Inter- 
course Act of 1834 provided for the exclusion of white residents, 
and safeguarded the native inhabitants. The Five Civilized Tribes 
were already colonizing the eastern end of the tract beyond Ar- 
kansas when the policy was undertaken. In succeeding years, as 
the course of events undid the work of Monroe’s policy, the Indian 


568 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Country was reduced; and with the Kansas-Nebraska legislation 
of 1854 it was stabilized between the Red River and the thirty- 
seventh parallel. The Indian Country had at this time the limits 
of the present State of Oklahoma, except for the narrow strip 
north of the Texas panhandle, which was not Texas or anything 
else, and acquired the name of No Man’s Land. 

The Civil War resulted in the confiscation of parts of the Indian 
lands as a penalty for adherence to the Confederacy,! and various 
plains tribes were colonized west of the Five Civilized Tribes in 
the succeeding years. The tract was commonly miscalled Indian 
Territory, although it possessed no government of territorial form; 
none at all in fact, since the federal laws did not operate within the 
territory to control vagrant whites who intruded, and the resident 
tribes had no lawful jurisdiction over such intruders. It became a 
refuge for fugitives from adjacent States and for adventurers who 
intermarried with Indian women. When the cattle industry de- 
veloped, the Indians who owned the land were allowed to lease 
the grazing rights to cattle companies, whose stock tenders thus 
acquired a sort of right to reside within the forbidden area.? 
Through these the fertility of the plains between the Arkansas and 
Red rivers became widely known; and it was learned as well that 
in the heart of Indian Territory were tracts of land to which the 
United States had acquired title from their former tribal owners. 
During Hayes’s presidency attempts began to occupy these ceded 
lands in the central part of Indian Territory upon the pretext 
that the preémption and homestead laws extended automatically 
over them. Oklahoma was the name spontaneously given to the 
area. 

The western end of the Indian Territory was continuously up- 
set during the decade of the eighties. Around it and through it 
new railroads were bringing in their thousands of colonists, some 
of whom did not try to keep. their covetous eyes off the plains of 
Oklahoma. In the southwest angle, Texas maintained a claim to a 
large piece of the country, alleging that the north fork of the Red 
River was the correct boundary fixed in 1819, rather than the 
Scuth Fork, which the United States claimed. Texas organized 
Greer County here and refused to admit United States ownership 


1 Annie H. Abel, The American Indian as a Slaveholder and Secessionist (1915), a learned 
and exhaustive work. 

2 President Cleveland canceled these leases, seeing no reasons why the cattle corpora- 
tions should confer on their employees privileges denied to ordinary citizens by the inter- 
course laws. R. M. McElroy, Grover Cleveland (1923). 


THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRONTIER — 569 


until the Supreme Court in 1892 (in the case of United States vs. 
Texas) rejected the Texas claim. At the northwest angle was No 
~ Man’s Land, for which Congress had no provision at all. Here the 
cowboys put together a short-lived local government under the 
name of Cimarron, in 1887, with Beaver as their principal set- 
tlement. But at the very center, between the Canadian and 
Cimarron forks of the Arkansas, and west of the Creek Nation, 
the chief disturbances of Indian Territory were on the plains of 
Oklahoma.’ 

As early as 1879 Hayes was obliged to warn by proclamation 
groups of prospective squatters that the Oklahoma lands were not 
open to settlement. The ““boomers”’ were congregating openly at 
convenient points on the border, principally at Arkansas City in 
Kansas, just north of the point where the Arkansas River crosses 
the Indian Territory line. The proclamation was ineffective, and 
the emigrants were arrested by federal troops, and escorted outside 
the Indian Country. Nearly every year after this the same attempt 
was made; speculators advertised freely that these lands were 
open, and Presidents proclaimed as often that they were not. 
When surplus lands became available under the Dawes Act of 
1887, and more of the acreage became United States property 
through agreement with the Creek and Seminole, the inducements 
to try to acquire the lands were increased. Among these ceded 
lands were some that Congress required to be added to the public 
domain. One of the earliest official acts of President Harrison was 
the issuance of a proclamation opening Oklahoma to entry at 
noon, April 22, 1889. 

There was as yet no territorial government, and the Oklahoma 
boomers were not of the type of the ordinary frontier farming 
families. They were speculators, and many of them had real 
money. By sunset of the entry day there were noisy boom towns 
at Guthrie and Oklahoma City, the plains were crowded with 
riders hurrying towards regions where they hoped to locate, and 
the land offices had long queues of prospective entrymen. For a 
year they lived in relative peace, under a few United States mar- 
shals, governed largely by their own good sense. In 1890 Con- 
gress gave them a territory whose irregular limits were extended 
from time to time as more land became available. When the Om- 
nibus States were admitted to the Union it was certain that event- 
ually Oklahoma must be admitted too, but whether it should be 
| 3 Roy Gittinger, The Formation of the State of Oklahoma (1917). 


570 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


in conjunction with Indian Territory and the Five Civilized Tribes, 
or alone, was less clear. 

Before the status of Oklahoma could be settled, Utah finished 
its long probationary period and became a State. It had behind 
it the novelty of the Mormon settlement in the desert, the odium 
of revolt against the United States in the Utah War of 1857, and 
above all the curse of polygamy. From the moment when the rev- 
elation concerning this was made public in 1852, American opin- 
ion forbade serious talk of statehood for a polygamous com- 
munity. The peculiarities that had made Mormons unpopular at 
Kirtland, Independence, Far West and Nauvoo were now enlarged 
so as to be overwhelming and unforgivable. The Mormon settle- 
ment throve under the joint influence of its own industry and the 
careful statesmanship of Brigham Young, but it was never possible 
to dissect its institutions and determine where church stopped 
and state began. In 1862 Congress passed a law making bigamy 
in the territories a federal offense, but since Mormon juries could 
not be expected either to indict or convict on this charge, and there 
were few Gentiles there, the law was a dead letter. Not until after 
railroad connection was established shortly after the completion 
of the Union Pacific Railroad did the Gentile population of Utah 
become a minority strong enough to be respected; even then it 
was sometimes soured by the fact that among its leaders were 
many Mormon renegades. 

The Edmunds Acts of 1882 created a commission government 
for Utah, and indicated the earliest determination of the United 
States to break up polygamy. It required the commissioners to 
make up a new list of voters, denying franchise, office, and even 
jury service to polygamists, and excluding believers in polygamy 
from jury service in cases of trials of offenders under the cohab- 
itation sections of the law. The property of the church was for a 
time seized and held in trust, while the non-Mormon inhabitants 
were given control of the territorial machinery. Vigorous prose- 
cutions of Mormon leaders who adhered to their polygamous 
families resulted in numerous convictions and sentences, which 
Federal authority now showed no disposition to relax. 

Under this régime, the Mormon church abandoned polygamy. 
This was formally announced at the church convocation in 1890, 
the act being generally accepted as a public surrender. In the 
clash of controversy it has not been possible to determine how 
large a part polygamy actually played in Mormon affairs. No 


THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRONTIER — 571 


Mormon historian has been allowed to tell the whole statistical 
truth, and no Gentile has been able to. The question of its sur- 
vival has often been a matter of religious or political controversy 
since 1890, but the discussions have uniformly contained more 
heat than light. In 1893 President Harrison, on the reeommen- 
dation of the Utah Commission and the appeal of the leaders of 
Mormon opinion, issued a general amnesty to Mormons who had 
respected the law since 1890, and in 1894 Congress enabled the 
territory to become a State. In January, 1896, Utah was admitted 
under a constitution that repudiated polygamy. 

After 1896 there remained New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma 
Territories, of which the last and youngest was much the farthest 
advanced, with 398,331 inhabitants in 1900. Its neighbor, still 
known as Indian Territory, with a preponderant Indian popu- 
lation, had 392,060 inhabitants. In both, the increase was accel- 
erated by the convenience of railroad approach, and the scarcity 
of other homestead lands in the public domain. In various 
places talk was heard of irrigation as a means of bringing arid 
- lands under cultivation, and Congress had gone so far as to pro- 
vide a general survey of irrigation sites on the public domain. 
But the total area of the valleys that might some day be put under 
ditch was a slight percentage of the mountainous, arid, and other- 
wise useless remainder of the public lands. Oklahoma contained 
as good land as the best had been, and grew instantly into a pop- 
ulous and prosperous territory once the barriers were lifted. It 
was vocal, too. It demanded statehood, keeping its desires before 
Congress at every session. By 1902 there was serious consider- 
ation of another omnibus bill that might take care of all the re- 
maining territories, and in 1906 such a bill was passed for the 
admission of Indian Territory and Oklahoma as one State, and 
New Mexico and Arizona as another. The latter combination 
was declined by the people concerned. 

By 1906 the Dawes Act had been in operation so long that the 
time was approaching when many of the former tribal members 
would become citizens of the United States, owning their estates 
in fee simple, and managing them themselves. The Burke Act of 
that year provided further guidance for the Secretary of the In- 
terior in administering this citizenship, while in the autumn a 
joint convention sat to frame a constitution under the name of 
Oklahoma. The resulting constitution, under which President 
~ Roosevelt admitted Oklahoma in 1907, was long and intricate. 


572 HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 


Its seventy pages carried to the extreme the same tendencies to 
make a code rather than an organic law, that were visible in the 
constitutions of 1889. The population of Oklahoma was mixed 
and exuberant, but lacked most of the typical characteristics of 
the older frontier States. 

Arizona rejected union with New Mexico in 1906, and was thus 
compelled to remain in territorial status for a few more years. 
There was a clash of populations here, the New Mexicans con- 
taining a strong element of Mexican stock, and being in many 
places only partly Americanized after half a century of annex- 
ation. In Arizona most of the inhabitants were American, with 
a prejudice against the Mexican. Here there was also a strong 
corporate interest, since the development of mines had brought 
into the territory much outside capital and many men to work it. 
This development was not entirely by pioneers of the ordinary 
type, but by company towns which were as concentrated in their 
management as the Mormon colonies in the desert valleys north 
of them. 

The enabling act for Arizona and New Mexico was passed in 
1910, and both territories framed their constitutions in the fol- 
lowing year. Their admission came in 1912, with New Mexico a 
few weeks ahead of Arizona because the latter had met with a 
form of obstacle unique in the history of statehood. It had em- 
bodied in its constitution all the most modern suggestions for re- 
form including a group of measures then on the firing line of insur- 
gency — initiative, referendum, direct primary, and recall. The 
last of these aroused the opposition of the President of the United 
States, William H. Taft, whose training as a judge, and whose 
conservative temper made him recoil at the idea of a recall of 
judges. He declined to issue the proclamation for the admission 
of Arizona so long as this principle was a part of the constitution. 
Appeal was made to Congress, but Congress, even with an op- 
position in control of the lower House, upheld the President. It 
was first suggested that there should be a special referendum on 
the article on recall, but the President would have none of this, 
and vetoed the bill. He signed a bill a few days later, permitting 
the entry of Arizona only after the offending article should be ex- 
cised. Arizona complied, and was admitted. The following elec- 
tion it flaunted its freedom in the face of the nation by amending 
its constitution and putting back into it the principle of the recall. 

This ended the story. With forty-eight States participating in 


THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRONTIER = 573 


the Union, the task was complete, and all of the main body of 
American territory had fulfilled that part of its destiny which had 
to do with the reclaiming of successive frontiers, and the erection 
thereon of self-governing States, autonomous yet integrally a 
part of their imperial system. The frontier had disappeared, and 
with it had been removed by the time the work was done, that 
special influence that has made American history unique. 

There was still ‘no cessation in the steady pressure of the newer 
West upon the Nation. With the admission of the Omnibus States 
the open frontier came substantially to an end, but the newest 
members of the Union were alive with complaints, and their 
younger associates were in fullest sympathy with them. The 
United States had yet to meet the attack of the Populists, the 
Progressives, and the various Farmer-Labor combinations. But 
the distinctive frontier influence was undergoing transmutation 
into agrarian influence, and the struggle was henceforth to be less 
a contest between the older sections and the young, and more a 
struggle of the agricultural elements of society against the indus- 
trial. The first century of American independence was dominated 
by the influence of the frontier; its second seems likely to be 
shaped by industry and the pressure of the outside world. 


THE END 


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INDEX 


Abbott-Downing coach, 464. 

Abilene, Kan., cow town, 536. 

Abolitionism, in Northwest, 397. 

Absentee ownership, attitude of frontier, 97, 
416, 417. 

Adams, C. F., on battle of New Orleans, 177. 

Adams, Ephraim, Iowa Band, 394. 

Adams, Henry, as historian, viewpoint, 107n., 
1li1n., 1337., 172n. 

Adams, J. Q., Spanish negotiations, 181-85; 
presidential candidacy, 249, 257; and in- 
ternal improvements, 249, 258; begins 
canal, 266. 

Adams, John, peace negotiations, 41; as 
minister in England, 79; presidency, 108. 

Admission of States, early evidence of prob- 
ability, 50, 54; and Ordinance of 1784, 62; 
promise in Ordinance of 1787, 68; and free 
self-zovernment, 88; Vermont, 88, 89; 
Kentucky, 90; Tennessee without enable- 
ment, 94; Ohio, 125-29; policy of enabling 
acts, 126, 565; Louisiana, 148; Indiana, 
195-97; Illinois, 197; Mississippi and 
Alabama, 210; domain considered avail- 
able (1819), 211, 212; Missouri and Maine, 
217-19; Arkansas, 286, 301, 302; Michigan, 
298, 299, 302; Texas, 353, 354; California, 
378, 379; Iowa, 394-96; Florida, 396; 
Wisconsin, 398-400; Minnesota, 445; Ore- 
gon, 446; Civil War and political need, 
456; West Virginia, 456; attempt for 
Colorado, 457, 555; Nevada, 457; Ne- 
braska, 458; Colorado, 554-56; later 
political scrutiny, 555-58, 560, 563; 
Dakotas, Washington, Montana, 557, 560- 
63; Congress and requirements in consti- 
tutions, 561-63; American theory of 
imperialism, 564; not forced on territories, 
565; essential act, 566; conventions and 
ratifications, 566; by presidential procla- 
mation, 567; Utah, 571; Oklahoma, 571; 
New Mexico and Arizona, 572. 

Agriculture, colonial, 2, 3;as chief industry, 
113, 439; railroads and frontier, 409, 426, 
544, 549; Missouri River and frontier, 
423; and Crimean War, 440; conservative 
conditions, 472; rise of efforts for improve- 
ment, 473; first colleges, 473; Morrill Act, 
473-78; improvement and _ public-land 
policy, 477; new type of western farmers, 
529; plains, and cattle industry, 541; 
agrarian influence and unrest, 573. 

Alabama, population (1820-50), 209; terri- 


tory, 210; statehood, 210, 567. See also 
Southwest. 

Albany, N.Y., early railway connection, 404. 

Albany Congress, and Americanization, 8. 

Alien and Sedition Acts, 108. 

Almonte, J. N., leaves, 355. 

Alton, IIll., distributing center, 194. 

Alvord, C. W., as historian of frontier, 7n.; 
8n., 36n. 

Amelia Island, occupation, 182. 

American Fur Company, development, 214; 
Missouri River traffic, steamboats, 331, 
452. 

American Revolution, and autonomous spirit, 
32; frontier phase, 33, 40; and Canada, 
34; Burgoyne’s campaign, 34; in North- 
west, Clark, 36-39; in South, 39, 40; peace 
negotiations, boundaries, 41, 42, 57, 84; 
land warrants, 53, 60. 

American System, frontier attitude, 157; 
elements, 244-49, 381; as administrative 
policy, 249, 258, 268; attitude of South, 
254, 255; political weakness, 255. 

Americanization, during colonial times, 1, 2, 
5, 7, 8, 11, 17, 32, 40; of frontier as process, 
43. 

Ames, Oakes, Crédit-Mobilier scandal, 500. 

Amherstburg. See Fort Malden. 

Anti-masonry, rise, 341. 

Apache Indians, Medicine Creek Council, 
505: 

Appalachian system, piedmont frontier, 6; 
settlement of valleys, 6, 7, 23; frontier 
crosses, 16-18, 20, 24. 

Arapahoe Indians, Fort Laramie Council, 
range, 426; unmolested, 442, 488; cession 
(1861), new reserve, 447, 488, 489; war, 
489-91; homeless, 491; Medicine Creek 
Council, 505, 506; Hancock’s raid, 5063 
renewal of trouble, Custer’s raid, 506, 507. 

Arikara Indians, Fort Laramie Council, 426. 

Arizona, precious metal discoveries, 453, 
454; territory, boundaries, 454; and South= 
ern Pacific, 546; declines joint statehood, 
571, 572; admission, recall question, 572. 
See also Rocky Mountain. 

Arkansas, boundaries, 213, 300; territory, 
211, 213; population (1820-40), 217, 302; 
statehood, constitution, 286, 301, 302, 
567; slow development, 299; riparian 
settlement, 300. 

Arkansas Banner, on new Democratic States, 
396. 


576 


Arkansas Post, 213. 

Arkansas River, improvement, 300. 

Army, western posts (1812), 171; reorganiz- 
ation (1815), frontier posts, 179, 213, 214, 
275, 284, 338; engineers and internal im- 
provements, 258; and plains Indians, 493, 
504, 506-09. See also Indians; and wars 
by name. 

Articles of Confederation, 
claims, 48-50. 

Asbury, Francis, as bishop, 116. 

Ashley, W. H., exploration, 364. 

Aspinwall, W. H., Pacific fleet, 370. 

Assiniboin Indians, Fort Laramie Council, 
426. 

Assumption of State debts, frontier attitude, 
105. 

Astor, J. J., fur trade, 179, 214; war finances, 
225. 

Astoria, founded, seized, 179. 

Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad, 
beginning, Royal Gorge war, 516, 517; 
cattle shipments, 538; southern extension, 
Mexican connection, 546, 547; westward 
extension, California connection, 547, 552. 
See also Pacific railroads. 

Atkinson, Henry, Black Hawk War, 289. 

Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, charter, land- 
grant, 514; Santa Fé line as assignee, 547; 
land grant voided, 552. See alse Pacific 
railroads. 

Atlantic slope, coastal plain frontier, 5; pied- 
mont frontier, 6; Appalachian valley 
frontier, 6. ; 

Austin, Moses, Texan grant, 305. 

Austin, 8. F., in Texas, 305, 308, 309. 

Autonomy. See Self-government. 


and western 


‘‘Badgers,’’ 287. 

Baltimore, and western trade, 259, 266. 

Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, beginning, 
266, 403; western connection, 405, 406, 
409, 439; federal aid, 415. 

Bancroft, H. H., collection, 351n., 376; on 
number of forty-niners, 376. 

Bank of Kentucky, 230. 

Bank of Tennessee, 231. 

Bank of the Commonwealth, 239, 240. 

Bank of the United States, first, its influence, 
229-31; establishment of second, 235; its 
early recklessness, branches, 235; western 
attacks, 236, 315; Marshall’s decisions, 
237, 238; Bonus Bill, 242; Jackson and re- 
charter struggle, 316, 317; removal of 
deposits, effect of readjustment, 317, 318. 

Banks, first Ohio, 129; frontier réle, 228; 
and social finance, currency and credit, 
228; restrictive period, 229, 230; effect of 
end of first federal bank, 230, 231; develop- 
ment in West, 230-32; first western cur- 
rency inflation, frauds, 232-34; character 


INDEX 


of western loans, 234; effect of panic of 
1819, 235, 238-40; western attitude on 
federal bank, 236-38, 315; second western 
inflation, 314; effect of pet banks, 317, 318; 
and government surplus as credit, 320; 
and distribution of surplus, suspension, 
321, 322; general western distrust, 322, 
394, 526; and Wisconsin constitution, 399, 
400; antebellum condition, 440. 

Bannack City, mining camp, 453; seat of 
government, 455. 

Bannock Indians, treaty and reservation, 
505. 

Baptist Church, and frontier, 116, 117. 

Barker, E. C., study of Texas, 303, 305n. 

Barlow, Joel, and Scioto Associates, 74. 

Beale, E. F., camel corps, 459. 

Bear Flag War, 367, 368. 

Beard, C. A., economic interpretation 
theory, 67. 

Becknell, William, Santa Fé trade, 326. 

Belmont Gazette, 292. 

Bennington, battle, 35. 

Benton, T. H., public kand policy, pre- 
emption, 224, 383, 384, 386, 390; and 
Santa Fé trade, 327; and Frémont in 
California, 356; and army command, 358; 
and New Mexican expedition, 358; and 
railroads, 413: as leader, 420; and river 
commerce, 437; and Pacific railroad, 467, 
468. 

Bent’s Fort, 447, 488. 

Biddle, Nicholas, bank struggle, 316-18. 

Bidwell, John, California caravan, 366. 

Bill of Rights, in Ordinance of 1784, 62; in 
Ordinance of 1787, 67; frontier idea, 100. 
Bill Williams Fork, gold discovery, 453, 

454. 

Billings, rederick, Northern Pacific, 544. 

Birney, J. G., candidacy, 353. 

Bismarck, N.D., named, 520; ambition, 556. 

Bitter Root Valley, as transcontinental route, 
452; mining camps, 452. 

Black Hawk Purchase, 290, 291. 

Black Hawk War, 289; as advertisement, 
S11: 

Black Hills, Sioux reserve, troubles, 505, 507; 
development, stage, 556. 

Black Kettle, and cession, 447; Chivington’s 
raid, 490; Custer’s raid, killed, 507. 

Blaine, J. G., Mulligan letters, 516. 

Blair, F. P., and Bank, 317. 

Blennerhassett, Harman, and Burr, 146. 

Blount, William, territorial governor, 92; 
foreign intrigue, 93; senator, 94. 

Board of Indian Commissioners, 505. 

Boise Valley, mining camps, 451, 452. 

Bolton, H. E., study of Southwest, 148n., 
303n., 304n., 361n. 

Bonneville, B. L. E., expedition, 332. 

Bonus Bill, 242. ; 


INDEX 


Boone, Daniel, Dunmore’s War, 28; in 
Kentucky, 29, 89. 

Boonesborough, station, 29, 89. 

Border States, and secession, 482. 

Boston, as colonial city, 2; early railroad 
connection, 404. 

Boston and Albany Railroad, construction, 
404. 

Boundaries, Quebec, 10, 27, 35; British East 
and West Florida, 10; Pennsylvania- 
Maryland-Virginia controversies, 15, 28, 
48; Vandalia, 23; Transylvania, 29; New 
York, 51; Erie triangle, 54; Georgia- 
South Carolina, 55; southwestern contro- 
versy, settlement, 57, 84-86; New Hamp- 
shire-Massachusetts, 87; Indiana Ter- 
ritory, 125; Ohio, proposed and adopted, 
125, 128; Louisiana Purchase, 134, 140, 
148, 149; northern, 138; Illinois Territory, 
162; northwestern line, 180; Indiana, 195; 
Arkansas Territory, 213; Michigan, Toledo 
War, 298, 299; Arkansas, 300; Texas and 
New Mexico, 371, 378; Yowa, 395; Wis- 
consin, 398; Territory of Jefferson, 445; 
Colorado, 446; Nevada, 450; Arizona, 454; 
Idaho and Montana, 455; Texas-Indian 
Territory, 568. Sce also Western claims. 

Bounty land, Revolutionary, 53, 60, 73; 
War of 1812, 189. 

Bowie, James, Alamo, 310. 

Bowles, Samuel, on railroad towns, 497. 

Bozeman Trail, Sioux opposition, 492, 505. 

Brackenridge, H. M., on Great Plains, 
216. 

Braddock’s expedition, 19, 20. 

Bradford, John, Kentucky paper, 94. 

Bridger, Jim, frontier scout, 332; 
Mormons, 346. 

British debts, controversy, 79, 82. 

Brook, Isaac, Detroit, 172. 

Brown, A. V., and overland mail, 462, 465. 

Brown, John, in Kansas, 448. 

Bryce, James, on western confidence, 556. 

Buchanan, James, Oregon treaty, 339; 
Kansas, 436; on overland mail, 463; and 
public lands, vetoes, 471, 474, 478, 479. 

Buenaventura River, myth, 366. 

Buffalo, and Erie Canal, 298; early railway 
connection, 404. 

Buffaloes, and open range, 535; market for 
pelts, 535. 

Bureau of Indian Affairs, created, 277; inef- 
ficiency and graft, 493, 503; Board of 
Indian Commissioners, 505. See also 
Indians. 

Burgoyne, John, campaign, 34. 

Burke Act, 512, 571. 

Burlington, Iowa, founded, 291; boom, 393. 

Burr, Aaron, and presidency, 109; career, 
144, 145; western project, 145, 304; and 
advertisement of West, 189, 


and 


577 


Butler, Benjamin; presidential candidacy, 
525. 
Butterfield, John, overland mail, 462-66. 


Cabin right, 25. See also Preémption. 

Cahokia, and Quebec Act, 35; river town, 
194. 

Cain Ridge, revival, 117. 

Cairo, Ill., created, 419; and Pacific railroad, 
429. 

Calhoun, J. C., as leader, 241, 420; national- 
ism and sectionalism, 241, 258; Indian 
policy, 275; nullification, 319; and Texas, 
352; and slavery in Far West, 370; Mis- 
sissippi Valley toast, 402; railroad con- 
vention, 402, 411; and land grants, 420. 

California, Spanish policy, 323; Smith’s 
exploration, 333, 364; Polk’s desire and 
plans, 354—56; Spanish occupation, 361-63; 
life, outside contact, 363; fur traders, 364; 
Sutter and early American settlers, 364— 
66; Robidoux’s advertisement, 365; search 
for routes, 366; Donner party, 367; Bear 
Flag War, 367, 368; occupation, 368, 369; 
problem of government, 369-71, 377; dis- 
covery of gold, rush, 372-77; mining law, 
373; population (1850-60), 376; military 
government, 377; vigilance committees, 
377, 560; constitutional convention, 378; 
admission, 379; boundary, 450; isolation, 
460; water route, 461; pony express, 465; 
telegraph, 466. See also Overland route; 
Pacific railroad. 

California Trail, beginning, 366; forty- 
niners on, 375; Indians and emigrants, 
425, 426; Mormons and, 450; overland 
mail and pony express, 462, 445-67. See 
also Oregon Trail; Union Pacific. 

Californian, suspended, 374. 

Callender, G. S., on frontier finance, 228. 

Camden, battle, 39. 

Camels, use in Far West, 459. 

Camp Collins, Indian concentration, 489. 

Camp Supply, Indian affairs (1868), 506. 

Campbell, William, and Wayne’s expedition, 
Wide 

Canada, and Indian intrigue, 161, 164; West 
and conquest, 167, 173, 176. See also War 
of 1812. 

Canadian Pacific Railway, cattle shipments, 
539; construction, 545. 

Canals, Erie, effect, 260-64; Pennsylvania 
system, 264, 265; Chesapeake and Ohio, 
265, 266; western routes, 268-70; finance 
and politics of western, 270, 272, 313; 
Ohio system, 271, 272; land grants to 
western, 272, 418; Indiana system, 272, 
313; Illinois, 273; results of western move- 
ment, 273, 274; period passes, 401, 407. 

Canby, E. R.S., and Sibley, 483, 484. 

Carey, Matthew, and protection, 245. 


578 


Carleton, J. H., expedition and mining, 453, 
454, 484. 

Carlisle Indian School, 510. 

Carrington, H. B., and Sioux, 492. 

Carroll, Charles, and railroad, 266. 

Carson, Christopher, and Kearny, 359. 

Carson City, founded, 450. 

Casa Yrujo, Marquis of, and Burr, 146, 148. 

Cass, Lewis, Indian treaties, 279; candidacy, 
370. 

Cattle industry. See Cow country. 

Céloron de Bienville, , journey, 18. 

Centinel of Northwestern Territory, 94. 

Central Pacific Railroad. See Union Pacific. 

Chandler, Zachariah, and Nez Percés, 508. 

Channing, Edward, as historian, viewpoint, 
DN., o37., L117.;.13830n. 

Charleston, as colonial city, 2; as cotton port, 
207; and western trade, 259, 266, 314, 406, 
411. 

Charlotiana, 22. 

Chase, 8. P., and Jay Cooke, 518. 

Cherokee Indians, location, progress, 14; 
early cessions, 14; treaty of Sycamore 
Shoals, 29; and frontier advance, 174; re- 
moval, 281. 

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 265, 266. 

Chesapeake-Leopard affair, 170. 

Cheyenne, founded, 455, 498. 

Cheyenne Indians, Fort Laramie Council, 
range, 426; unmolested, 442, 488; cession 
(1861), new reserve, 447, 488, 489; war, 
489-91; homeless, 491; Medicine Creek 
Council, 505, 506; Hancock’s raid, 506; 
renewal of trouble, Custer’s raid, 506, 
507. 

Chicago, Fort Dearborn, 171, 172; laid out, 
named, 2738; Indian treaty (1833), 290; 
ambition, 291; development, 311, 488, 
439; race for eastern railroad connections, 
407, 408; Rivers and Harbors Convention, 
411, 412, 439, 477; and Pacific railroad, 
429; and McCormick’s reaper, 477; Union 
Stock Yards, 534. 

Chicago River, canal route, 270. 

Chickasaw Indians, location, 14, 93; and 
frontier advance, 174; removal, 281. 

Chillicothe, Ohio, settled, 73; and democracy, 
124; seat of government, 126. 

Chinese, labor on Central Pacific, 498. 

Chippewa Indians, cession (1784), 61; (1825), 
279, 282; western settlement, 282, 290; 
eastern range, 282, 283, 293. 

Chivington, J. M., attack on Indians, 490. 
Choctaw Indians, location, 14; and frontier 
advance, 174; cessions, 174; removal. 281. 

Chouteau, Pierre, St. Louis, 83. 

Christian Church, 117. 

Cimarron, self-created government, 569. 

Cincinnati, settled, naming, 72; population 
(1800), 113; and railroad to Charleston, 





INDEX 


314, 406, 411; early railroad connection, 
407, 409; meat packing, 534. 

Cincinnati, Society of the, organized, 60. 

Citizenship, Indian, 510, 511. 

Civil War, and western economic bonds, 
157, 527; impossibility of southern success, - 
302; and need of new States, 456-58; and 
overland mail, 465; and Pacific railroad, 
469; and nationalism, 481; Border States 
and, 482; western border operations, 483- 
85; Confederates and Indians, 485, 486; 
Indian wars, 485-91; prosperity during, 
513; Jay Cooke and finance, 517-19; legal 
tenders, 523. See also Secession. 

Claiborne, W. C. C., agent to receive Louisi- 
ana, 154; as governor, 140, 148. 

Clark, G. R., expedition, 33, 36-39, 42; and 
France, 93, 107. 

Clark, W. A., Montana convention, 558. 

Clark, William, expedition, 185-38; Indian 
treaties, 278, 279. 

Clay, Henry, and Burr, 146, 147; Speaker 
and war hawk, 150, 167; peace negotia- 
tions, 176; and Spanish America, 182, 183, 
185; Missouri Compromise, 218, 219; as 
leader, 241, 420; nationalism, 241; Ameri- 
can System, speech (1824), 244-47, 253, 
381; presidential candidacy, 249, 257, 353; 
and West, 250, 253, 255; attack on Jack- 
son’s Florida actions, 256; and Bank, 316; 
Compromise Tariff, 319; Compromise of 
1850, 379; distribution of land proceeds, 
384-86, 390, 391; and abolitionism, 398. 

Clearwater Valley, mining camps, 451. 

Cleaveland, Moses, in Connecticut Reserve, 
73: 

Clemens, S. L., on Mississippi River, 438n.; 
on Nevada, 450; on overland route, 464; 
on lawlessness, 559. 

Cleveland, Grover, Washington veto, 557; 
and Montana, 558; Omnibus Bill, 560; 
and Indian Territory, 568n. 

Cleveland, canal and growth, 271, 298. 

Clinton, DeWitt, Erie Canal, 262, 263, 271; 
and Ohio canals, 268. 

Cocke, William, Dunmore’s War, 28. 

Cody, W. F., and Wild West, 538, 556. 

Colonies, development of frontier, 1, 5-7; 
Americanization, 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 17, 32; 
population, 2; race origins, 3-5; western 
projects, 22; acquirement and administra- 
tion of public lands, 45, 46. 

Colorado, gold rush, 441-45; Kansas counties, 
443; self-organization, Territory of Jeffer- 
son, 444-46; population (1860), 446; pre- 
carious development, 447; territory, 
boundaries, 447, 448; attempted statehood, 
457, 565; Sibley’s march, 483; and Indians, 
489-91; cattle quarantine, 542; admission, 
554-56; continued territorial character- 
istics, 554; agriculture, 555; admission 


INDEX 


contested, 562. See also Great Plains; 
Rocky Mountain. 

Colorado River, as barrier, 366. 

Comanche Indians, cession, 281; Medicine 
Creek Council, 505, 506. 

Commerce, colonial, 2; contest for western, 
157, 259, 264, 267, 272, 314, 482; meat, 
540. See also Fur trade; Internal improve- 
ments; Transportation. 

Compromise of 1850, problems, 371; pro- 
visions, outcome, 379; and secession, 433; 
finality, 433. ; 

Concord coach, 464. 

Conestoga wagon, 4. 

Congress, North Carolina cession, 56, 91; 
Georgia cession, 57; Western Reserve, 74; 
Gallipolis, 74; Vermont, 89; Kentucky, 91; 
Territory south of the River Ohio, 92; 
Tennessee, 94; Alien and Sedition Acts, 
108; Mississippi Territory, 118, 149; land 
acts (1796), 120; (1800), 121; (1820), 224; 
Indiana Territory, 125, 141; Ohio, 126, 128; 
Territory of Orleans, 141; Michigan Terri- 
tory, 141, 162, 291; Louisiana (Missouri) 
Territory, 141, 212; Illinois Territory, 148, 
162; Louisiana, 148, 149; Cumberland 
Road, 151, 152, 248; Florida Territory, 
183; bounty land, 129; Indiana, 195-97; 
Illinois, 197; Alabama Territory, 210; 
Mississippi, 210; Alabama, 210; Arkansas 
Territory, 211, 213, 217, 300; Missouri and 
Maine, 217-19; United States Bank, 235, 
242: Bonus Bill, veto, 242; tariff, 245, 
246, 319, 391, 412; Road Survey Bill, 248, 
249; land grants to canals, 272; Indian 
acts, 277, 278; Wisconsin Territory, 292; 
Iowa Territory, 293, 392; Michigan, 299; 
Arkansas, 301, 302; bank recharter, 316, 
317; distribution of surplus, 320; Santa Fé 
Trail, 327; Texas, 353, 354; Mexican War, 
357; Oregon Territory, 370; Compromise 
of 1850, 371, 379; preémption, 390, 391; 
Florida and Iowa, 395, 396; Wisconsin, 
398, 400; internal improvements aid, 414; 
land grants for railroads, 417, 418, 420-22, 
468, 514, 515; Minnesota Territory, 424; 
Pacific railroad survey, 430, 467; Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, 433-35; Minnesota, 446; 
Oregon, 446; Colorado Territory, 446; 
Kansas, 449; Dakota ‘Territory, 449; 
Nevada Territory, 450; Arizona Territory, 
454; Idaho Territory, 455; Montana 
Territory, 455; Wyoming Territory, 455; 
West Virginia, 456; Colorado, 457, 555; 
Nevada, 457; Nebraska, 458; overland 
mail, 461; Pacific railroad grants, 469, 495, 
514-16; Morrill Act, 473, 474; Homestead 
Act, 478, 479; Crédit Mobilier, 500; 
Indian affairs investigation, 502-05; and 
Indian treaties, 509; Indian land in 
ceveralty, 511; deflation and resumption, 


579 


524, 525; politics and admission of States, 
555-58, 560, 563; omnibus statehood bill, 
557, 560; Wyoming and Idaho, 563; Okla- 
homa Territory, 569; Edmunds Act on 
polygamy, 570; Utah, 571; Oklahoma, 
571; New Mexico and Arizona, 572. 
Connecticut, western claim, cession and re- 
serve, 54; Wyoming controversy, 55. 
Connecticut Reserve, 55; opening, progress, 


Connecticut River, frontier route, 12. 

Connolley, John, at Pittsburgh, 28. 

Connor, P. E., and Sioux, 492, 505. 

Constitutional convention, American idea 
and policy, 99, 196, 566; Minnesota’s 
unique, 445. See also Constitutions. 

Constitutionality, American doctrine of re- 
view, 98. 

Constitutions, Kentucky, 90, 91; American 
theory, 97-101, 566; Ohio, 127; Louisiana, 
148; popular ratification, 210, 301, 566; 
Michigan, 298; Arkansas, 301; Texas, 354; 
California, 378; Wisconsin, 398-400; Illi- 
nois, 528; Congress and requirements 
for admission, 561-63; as codes, 563, 572; 
Arizona, and direct government, 572. 

Continental Congress, Indians, 36; status, 
47; land problem, 49, 58; western claims, 
50, 52-56; Wyoming controversy, 55; 
Northwest, 61-63, 65-69. 

Conventions, and frontier emotionalism, 
410. See also Constitutional convention. 

Cooke, Jay, as financier of Civil War, 517-19; 
and Northern Pacific, 519-21; failure, 521. 

Cooper, Peter, presidential candidacy, 525. 

Cornplanter, Fort Stanwix Treaty, 61. 

Cornstalk, Dunmore’s War, 28. 

Cornwallis, Lord, in South, 39, 40. 

Corporations. See Public utilities. 

Corydon, Ind., seat of government, 193. 

Cotterill, R. S., railroad study, 408”., 411n. 

Cotton, culture and slavery, 201-07; west- 
ward trend, 207; prosperity of the fifties, 
440. 

Coues, Elliott, study of explorations, 137n., 
138n., 326n. 

Council Bluffs and Union Pacific, 498. 

Counterfeiting, bank notes, 234. 

County government, as frontier study, 
195. 

Cow country, and railroads, 533, 536, 540, 
541; meat industry before rise, 533, 534; 
perception of open range, 535; and buffalo 
range, 535; Texan cattle, 535; elements of 
development of meat industry, 536, 540; 
breeding range, 536; round-up, 537; cow- 
boys, 537; marketing, cow towns, 538, 
539; long drive to northern ranges, 538, 
542, 558; northern ranches, fencing, il- 
legality, 539, 542, 551, 558; influence and 
6conomic problems, 540; boom, free grasa, 


580 


541; and last frontier, 543; causes of dis- 
appearance, 541-43; Indian Territory, 
568. 

Cow towns, 536, 538, 539. 

Cowboy, rise, type, 537. See also Cow 
country. 

Cowpens, battle, 40. 

Craigie, Andrew, Scioto Associates, 69. 

Crane, W. H., and Senator Plumb, 554n. 

Crawford, W. H., presidential candidacy, 
249, 256. 

Credit. See Finance; Public lands. 

Crédit Mobilier, Union Pacific construction, 
499; scandal, 500. 

Creek Indians, location, 14; and frontier 
advance, 174; war and cession, 174-76; re- 
moval, 281. 

Crimean War, and American prosperity, 440. 

Crocker, C. C., Central Pacific, 469; con- 
struction company, 499. 

Crockett, David, Alamo, 310. 

Culpeper, Lord, land grant, 17. 

Cumberland, Md. See Fort Cumberland. 

Cumberland agreement, 30. 

Cumberland Gap, trail, 29. 

Cumberland Presbyterians, 117. 

Cumberland Road, projected, route, 151; 
building, 152; repairs, constitutional 
question, 153, 243, 248; use, as bond of 
unity, 153; extension beyond Ohio River, 
153, 258, 268, 327. 

Currency, banks and development, 229; 
western inflation, 232, 314; Specie Circular, 
321; panic and distrust of bank paper, 322; 
antebellum condition and gold basis, 440, 
523; war-time paper basis, 523; postbellum 
condition and debtor class, 524, 525. ; 

Curtis, S. R., and Indians, 490. 

Custer, G. A., Washita affair, 507; in Black 
Hills, massacre, 507, 508. 

Cutler, Manasseh, Ohio Company, 65; and 
Northwest Ordinance, 66. 

Cuyahoga River, and canal routes, 269. 


Dakota, territorial government, 449; settle- 
ment centers, 449, 556; loses territory, 455; 
temporary addition, 455; Black Hills, 505, 
507, 556; development, 556; statehood 
movement, 556, 557; admission as two 
States, 557, 560-63. See also Great Plains. 

Darwin, Charles, and agricultural advance, 
473. 

Davenport, Iowa, founding, 291. 

Davis, J. G., on Illinois boom, 311. 

Davis, Jefferson, and Pacific railroad, 430, 
460, 467; as Democratic leader, 433. 

Dawes Act, 511, 571. 

Dearborn, Henry, command, 171. 

DeBow’s Southern Review, on Wabash Canal, 
273n. 

Debts, and greenback movement, 522-25. 


INDEX 


See also Banks; Currency; Finance; Panics; 
Public debts; Stay and tender. 

Delaware Indians, cessions, 61, 162, 482; and 
Fort Harmar Treaty, 75; western settle- 
ment, reserve, 282, 432. 

Democracy, frontier spirit, 7, 25; Jefferson 
and Jackson, 127. See also Jacksonian 
Democracy; Jeffersonian Democracy; 
Self-government. 

Democratic party, cleavage, 253, 257; and 
new States (1845), 396; and antebellum 
territories, 445, 446; and _ postbellum 
States, 555, 557, 560, 562. See also Jack- 
sonian Democracy; Jeffersonian Demo- 
ocracy. 

Denver, founding, 443; seat of government, 
447; Kansas Pacific, 501; and Denver and 
Rio Grande, 516. 

Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, construc- 
tion, Royal Gorge war, 516, 517. 

Deposit, right at New Orleans, 
Tol, 

Des Moines, fort, 214. 

Deseret, State of, 349. See also Mormons. 

Detroit, and Quebec Act, 35; seat of govern- 
ment, 141; post, 171; surrender, 172. 

Dillon, Sidney, Union Pacific, 500. 

Diomed, importation, 473. 

Direct government. See Self-government. 

Distribution, of public land proceeds, 384-86, 
390, 391. See also Surplus. 

Dodge, A. C., senator, 400. 

Dodge, G. M., Union Pacific, 497. 

Dodge, Henry, as Wisconsin squatter, 288; 
and Indians, 289, 290; territorial gover- 
nor, 292, 397; Fort Snelling Treaty, 293; 
senator, 400. 

Dodge City, Kan., cow town, 536, 538. 

Dodgeville, Wis., founding, 288. 

Dominicans, in Lower California, 362. 

Donaldson, Thomas, on Homestead Act, 
549. 

Donelson, John, Nashville, 30. 

Doniphan, A. W., expedition, 359. 

Donnelly, Ignatius, papers, 526n. 

Donner party, 367. 

Douglas, S. A., solution of sectionalism, 420, 
435; and grants to railroads, 421; and 
Pacific railroads, 422, 467; Democratic 
leader, 433; Kansas-Nebraska Bill, motive, 
433-35. 

Dow, Lorenzo, frontier preacher, 117n. 

Draper Manuscripts, on frontier history, 287. 

Duane, W. J., and deposits, 317. 

Dubuque, Julian, lead mine, 138. 

Dubuque, lead mines, 138, 287; founding, 
291; Miners’ Bank, 292. 

Dubuque Visitor, 292. 

Dueling, frontier attitude, 251. 

Duer, William, Scioto Associates, 69, 74. 

Duluth, and Pacific railroad, 429, 519. 


86, 130, 


INDEX 


Dunmore, Lord, and Pennsylvania boun- 
dary, 16, 28. 
Dunmore’s War, 28. 


Earthquake of 1811, 150. 

East Florida, British province, boundaries, 
10, 57. See also Florida. 

Economic conditions, and nationalism, 481. 
See also Agriculture; Commerce; Cow 
country; Finance; Land; Manufactures; 
Mining; Panics; Prosperity; Speculation; 
Tariff. ’ ; 

Economic influences, in early national policy, 
67, 104. 

Edmunds Act, 570. 

Education, land grants, 129; agricultural, 
Morrill Act, 473-75; Indian, 509, 510. 
Edwardsville, Ill., distributing center, 194. 

Eel River Indians, cessions, 162. 

“Egypt,’’ southern Illinois, 199. 

Elections, (1800), 110; (1824), 249, 256; 
(1828), 257; (1840), 338, 351, 386; (1844), 
339, 352; (1848), 370; greenback move- 
ment in, 522, 524, 525; (1876), Colorado’s 
vote, 556, 562; (1888), and new States, 557. 

Embargo, effect, 188. 

Emerson, R. W., abandons pulpit, 342. 

Emory, W. H., notes on Kearny’s march, 
359. 

Enabling acts, policy, 126, 565. See also Ad- 
mission of States. 

Equality, frontier attitude, 96, 251. 

Erie, Pa., gauge war, 405. 

Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad, 407. 

Erie Canal, origin and building, 260-63; 
effect, 263, 296, 298, 311; and railroads, 
406, 527. 

Erie Railroad, construction, 405. 

Erie triangle, 54, 119. 

Etna, river steamboat, 158. 

Evans, John, and Indians, 489. 

Evansville, Ind., distributing center, 193. 

Executive, early American idea, 98, 100, 127. 

Expansion, not deliberate, 184; limit thought 
reached, 185, 216, 275, 283, 411; belief in 
manifest destiny, 252. 

Explorations, Gist, 17; Lewis and Clark, 134— 
38; Pike on Mississippi, 138; Pike in West, 
141-43; Long, 215-17; Bonneville, 332; 
Frémont, 336, 366, 367; Ashley, 364. 


Fairfax, Lord, land, boundary, 17, 48. 

Fairfax Stone, 17, 48. 

Fall line, and frontier, 6; proposed national 
road, 208, 209. 

Fallen Timbers, battle, 78. 

Family, frontier, 114. 

Far West. See Great Plains; Pacific Coast; 
Rocky Mountain and Plateau region. 

Far West, Mo., Mormons, 344. 

Federal Constitution, and internal improve- 


581 


ments, 153, 242, 243, 247, 248: frontier and 
implied powers, 237, 238. 

Federal Road, 209. 

Federalist party, Washington’s leadership, 
87, 102; and France, 107, 108; fall, 108-10; 
and Louisiana Purchase, 134; dissolution, 
20a: 

Fetterman, W. J., ambushed, 493. 

Fillmore, Millard, Compromise of 1850, 379; 
railroad land grants, 468. 

Finance, frontier belief in eastern exploita- 
tion, 225; frontier requirement, credit, 226, 
227; lack of capital in frontier develop- 
ment, 227;of War of 1812, 232, 235; panic 
of 1819 and frontier burden, relief laws, 
238—40; of western canals, 270, 272; States 
in business, 312, 414; inflation and prices, 
313; effect of removal of deposits, 318; 
effect of government surplus and distribu- 
tion, 319-22; problem of capital for in- 
ternal improvements, 412-16; absenteeism, 
416, 417; railroad, and land grants, 421; 
foreign capital, 440; of Pacific railroad con- 
struction, 494, 499, 516, 519-21. See also 
Banks; Currency; Panics; Public debts; 
Speculation. 

Fire Lands, 73; and canal and railroad, 271. 

Fisher, 8. G., study of Revolution, 33n. 

Fiske, John, study of Revolutionary era, 
40n., 65n. 

Fitch, John, steamboat, 155. 

Fitzpatrick, Thomas, Fort Laramie Council, 
426. 

Five Civilized Tribes. See Cherokee; Chicka- 
saw; Choctaw; Creek; Indian Territory; 
Seminole. 

Fletcher vs. Peck, 57. 

Florida, annexation, 182, 183; territory, 183; 
Seminole War, 281, 396; statehood, 392, 
395, 396, 567; population (1850), 396. See 
also East Florida; West Florida. 

Food, character of American, 533. See also 
Cow country. 

Forbes, John, expedition, 20. 

Forbes Road, 20, 259. 

Fort Armstrong, built, 180, 214; Indian 
treaty (1832), 290. 

Fort Benton, trading post, 332; road to Fort 
Walla Walla, 452. 

Fort Boisé, trading post, 338. 

Fort Bridger, trading post, 332, 338. 

Fort C. F. Smith, built, 492. 

Fort Cobb, Indian affairs (1868), 507. 

Fort Craig, in Civil War, 483, 484. 

Fort Crawford, built, 180, 214. 

Fort Cumberland, built, 17. 

Fort Dearborn, post, 171; massacre, 172. 
See also Chicago. 

Fort Defiance, built, 77. 

Fort Duquesne, contest for, 18-20. See also 
Pittsburgh. 


582 INDEX 


Fort Garry, British fur-trade center, 215;| Franklin, State of, 31. 


settlement around, 331. Free Soil party, homestead plank, 478. 
Fort Hall, trading post, 338. Frémont, J. C., credit as ‘‘pathfinder,’”’ 336; 
Fort Hamilton, built, 76. and conquest of California, 356, 368, 369; 
Fort Harmar, built, 61; Indian treaty (1789), expeditions, 366, 367; senator, 378; survey 

75. of Pacific railroad route, 467; arrest in 
Fort Harrison, built, 165. France, 521. 

Fort Hawkins, as frontier line, 174. Freneau, Philip, and Alien Act, 108. 

Fort Hays, 507. Frontier, colonial, and Americanization, 1, 
Fort Howard, built, 180, 214. 2, 7,40; non-English colonial frontiersmen, 
Fort Jackson, built, 175. 38-5; and democracy, 7, 25; proclamation 
Fort Jefferson, built, 76. of 1763, 10, 11, 14, 22, 27; line (1763), 12- 
Fort Kearney, built, 338. 14; (1800), 1138; (1810), 191; (1817), 194; 
Fort Knox, Vincennes, 165. (1890, 1900), 553; colonial land schemes, 


Fort Laramie, built, 338; importance, 425; 17, 22; headwaters of the Tennessee, 24— 
Indian council (1850), 426; (1868), 505; 27; autonomous government, 25, 27, 30- 


Indian concentration, 489. 32, 97; phase of American Revolution, 33, 
Fort Larned, Indian concentration, 489. 40; stages (1748-1800), 33; and Quebec 
Fort Leavenworth, built, 214; and Santa Fé Act, 35; frontiersmen and military opera- 

trade, 328; and Oregon migration, 338. tions, 37, 39; in peace negotiations, 41, 42; 
Fort Loudoun, built, 24. as process, 43; as region and line, 44; land 
Fort Lyon, Arapahoe-Cheyenne agency, as chief problem, attitude, 45, 381-83, 552; 

489, 507. advance (1787-1800), 71, 94; indigenous 
Fort McIntosh Treaty, 61. and inherited traits, 95; influence of 
Fort Malden, fur-trade center, 160, 161. isolation, 95, 113; self-confidence, 96; 
Fort Mims, massacre, 174. equality, 96, 251; inherited expression of 
Fort Necessity, 19. ideas, 97; written constitution, elements 
Fort Phil Kearny, built, 492. and framing, 97-100; departments of 
Fort Pierre, army post, 492. government, 100; franchise and office 
Fort Prince George, built, 24. qualifications, 100; natural rights, 100; 
Fort Recovery, built, 77. political practice and revolts, 102, 410; 
Fort Ross, Russian post, 365. rise of Jeffersonian Democracy, 104-11; 
Fort Scott, built, 180. political power (1800-20), 111; dwellings, 
Fort Smith, built, 213. 114; family life, 114; social gatherings, 115; 


Fort Snelling, built, 214; fur trade, 293; religion, 115-18, 342, 410; institutional 
Indian treaty (1837), 293; steamboat at, influence of land, 118; private land sales, 


394. 118; transportation difficulties and de- 
Fort Stanwix Treaty (1768), 13; (1784), 61. mand, 150, 154, 402; and American Sys- 
Fort Union, trading post, 332, 452. tem, 157; contest for control of market, 
Fort Vancouver, Hudson’s Bay Company 157, 259, 264, 267, 272, 314, 482; Wabash 

post, 335. River line, 160-62; localism and national- 
Fort Walla Walla, road to Fort Benton, 452. ism, 167, 241, 481; War of 1812 and ad- 
Fort Washington, Cincinnati, 72. vance, 173, 178; posts after 1815, 179, 213, 


Fort Wayne, Indian conference (1809), re- 214, 275, 338; eastern depression and west- 
pudiation, 162-64, 192; post (1812), 171. ern advertisement, 187-90, 219, 274, 286, 


Fort Whipple, seat of government, 454. 311; forces of advance, 186; crests of mi- 
Fort Winnebago, built, 289. gration, 187, 190, 219, 274, 286, 311, 437; 
Fort Wise, Indian treaty (1861), 447, 448. river-route advance, towns (1810-20), 
France, contest for America, 1, 18; in peace 193, 194; road penetration, 194; study of 
negotiations (1782), 41, 42; relations with, local government, 195; phases and sec- 
80, 107; quasi-war, 108; Louisiana Pur- tional deviations, 204—07; cotton belt, 207; 
chase, 131-34. and slavery question, 211; tidewater fear, 
Franchise, frontier manhood, 91, 100; Ohio, 224; neighborly advance, 227, 295, 307, 
127; Michigan, 298; Wisconsin, 399. 353, 393; lack of capital, 227; and implied 
Franciscans, in California, 362. powers, 237; and internal improvements, 
Frankfort, Ky., population (1800), 113. 243; appeal in leadership, Clay or Jack- 


Franklin, Benjamin, intercolonial post-office, son, 250-53, 255-57; field of Jacksonian 
8; and French and Indian War, 8; and migration, 286; change in sectional bal- 
western colonies, 22, 23; peace negotia- ance and politics, 295-97, 394, 400; and 
tions, 41. Bank of United States, 315; general dis- 

Franklin, Mo., career, 217, trust of banks, 322, 394, 399, 526; effect of 


INDEX 


Santa Fé trade, 329; importance of 1832, 
334; after panic of 1837, 338, 392; and 
Harrison’s candidacy, 338, 351; Mormon 
phase, 341; and Mexican annexations, 
369; railroads and agricultural frontier, 
409, 426, 544, 549; transition after the 
forties, 423; Missouri River and agri- 
cultural frontier, 423; panic of 1857 and 
advance, 441; new processes and dis- 
appearance, 458; elements of last period, 
480, 512, 513, 521, 548; closing, and 
Indian policy, 509;‘and greenback move- 
ment, 522, 526; transportation as tax, 526; 
and regulation of public utilities, 531; 
isolation abolished, 549; influence be- 
comes agrarian, 573. See also Appalachian 
system; Atlantic slope; Economic con- 
ditions; Government; Great Plains; In- 
dians; Mississippi Valley; Pacific Coast; 
Public lands; Rocky Mountain and 
Plateau region; Routes. 

Frontier posts, and Indian troubles, 76-78; 

controversy and British evacuation, 79- 

82. 

Fur trade, and British-held frontier posts, 
76, 79; St. Louis as center, 83, 212; upper 
Mississippi River, Fort Snelling, 139, 293; 
Fort Malden as British center, 160; far 
western development, 179; foreign traders 
excluded, 179, 214; British combination, 
Fort Garry, 214; Missouri River traffic, 
331, 452; Oregon Country, 335; California, 
364. 


Gadsden Purchase, and Pacific railroad, 431. 

Gaines, E. P., and frontier posts, 285; and 
Black Hawk, 289. 

Galena, Ill., mines, 287. 

Gallatin, Albert, and Whiskey Insurrection, 
107; and Alien Act, 108; and Cumberland 
Road, 152; war finances, 176; boundary 
negotiations, 180. j 

Gallipolis, Ohio, settled, 74. 

Galvez, José de, and California, 362. 

Garrison, G. P., study of Texas, 303. 

Gass, Patrick, journal, 137. 

General Land Office, Hamilton’s plan, 120; 
established, 220. See also Public lands. 
Genét, E. C., as minister, intrigues, 80, 107. 
Georgia, South Carolina boundary, 55; 
western claim, 55-57; Yazoo lands, 57; 
and Bank of United States, 237; removal 

of Indians, 281. 

German Fiats, 4. 

Germans, colonial frontiersmen, 3; unassimi- 
lated, 17. 

Gerry, Elbridge, French mission, 108. 

Ghent, Treaty of, 176, 178. 

Gillespie, A. H., and Frémont, 356, 368. 

Gilpin, William, governor, 447; and Sibley’s 
offensive, 484. 


583 


Girard, Stephen, war finances, 235. 

Gist, Christopher, explorations, 17. 

Glendive, Mon., cow town, 539, 558. 

Godkin, E. L., on Northern Pacific, 545. 

Godoy, Manuel de, American negotiations, 
85. 

Gold, California discovery, rush, 372-77; 
Colorado discovery, rush, 441-45; other 
Rocky Mountain camps, 451-54. 

Goodwin, Cardinal, on Robidoux, 365. 

Government, frontier theories, 95-101; 
effect of responsibility on theories, 103, 
130. See also Admission of States; Congress; 
Constitutions; Politics; Self-government; 
Territorial governments; Union. 

Graduation, public-land policy, 384. 

Grain elevators, public warehouses, 528. 

Grand Trunk Railroad, importance, 405. 

Grande Ronde Valley, settlement, 339. 

Granger movement, State regulation of 
railroads, 528; rise of Patrons of Hus- 
bandry, 528, 529; its mechanism, 529; 
Patrons and railroad-regulation politics, 
530; railroad reaction to regulation, 531; 
granger decisions, 531; as frontier move- 
ment, 532. 

Grant, U. S., and Nez Percés, 508. 

Granville, Earl, North Carolina land, 26. 

Grattan, J. L., Sioux kill, 491. 

Gray, Robert, in Oregon, 180. 

Great Britain, frontier posts and Jay’s 
negotiations, 76-82, 107; boundary settle- 
ment, 180. See also American Revolution; 
Colonies; Oregon Country; War of 1812. 

Great Lakes, development of basin, 264, 268, 
271, 296, 394, 400; first steamboat, 298. 

Great Miami River, canal route, 270. 

Great Northern Railroad, construction, 545. 

Great Plains, Lewis and Clark expedition, 
134-38; considered uninhabitable, 137, 
184, 216, 252, 283; Pike’s expedition, 141-— 
43; Missouri River traffic, 158, 215, 331, 
452; Long’s exploration, 216; habitable- 
ness realized, 329, 332, 340; railroads and 
settlement, 423; Bozeman Trail, 492, 505. 
See also Cow country; Indian Territory; 
Indians; Louisiana Purchase; Oregon 
Trail; Overland route; Pacific railroads; 
Santa Fé Trail; and states by name. 

Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company, 
461. 

Greeley, Horace, Rivers and Harbors Con- 
vention, 412; Colorado journey, 444. 

Greenback movement, as frontier mani- 
festation, 522; causes, 522-25; party, 
2D: 

Greene, Nathanael, in South, 40. 

Greenville Treaty, 78. 

Greer County, controversy, 568. 

Gregg, Josiah, on Santa Fé Trail, 328, 329. 

Grinnell College, beginning, 394, 


584 


Grosventre Indians, Fort Laramie Council, 
426. 

Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty, 360. 

Guilford Courthouse, battle, 40. 

Guthrie, Ok., founding, 569. 

Gwin, W. M., California constitutional 
convention, 378; senator, 378; on Pacific 
railroad routes, 430; and pony express, 
465. 


Hagedorn, Hermann, on cowboy, 538. 

Hamilton, Alexander, and strong govern- 
ment, 104—06; land report, 120; and Burr, 
duel, 144, 145. 

Hamilton, Sir Henry, in American Revolu- 
tion, 36, 38, 39. 

Hancock, W. S., Indian raid, 506. 

Hanna, C. A., study of frontier, 17n. 

Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, construc- 
tion, 438. 

Hard Labour Treaty (1768), 14. 

Harmar, Joseph, Indian expedition, 76. 

Harper, Robert, ferry, race, 17. 

Harper’s Ferry, 17. 

Harris’s Ferry, 17. 

Harrison, Benjamin, proclaims States, 563; 
opening of Oklahoma, 569; amnesty for 
Mormons, 571. 

Harrison, W. H., delegate, career, 121, 124; 
land bill, 121; governor, 125, 191; and 
Burr, 146; Indian councils, 161, 162, 192; 
and Tecumseh, Tippecanoe, 163-65; and 
squatters, 164; military ambition, 165; 
Thames River, 173; and advertisement of 
West, 189; and slavery, 198; presidential 
candidacy, support, 338, 386. 

Aarrod, James, station, 29, 89. 

Harrodsburg, station, 29, 89. 

Harte, Bret, on Pacific railroad, 500; on 
lawlessness, 559. 

Hartford Convention, 253. 

Hauser, S. T., governor, 558. 

Hawkins, Benjamin, as Indian agent, 174. 

Hayes, R. B., Indian policy, 511; Colorado 
vote and election, 556, 562; and Indian 
Territory squatters, 569. 

Hayne, R. Y., railroad convention, 314, 411; 
occasion of Webster debate, 381. 

Hayt, E. A., Indian policy, 511. 

Hazard, Samuel, colonial scheme, 22. 

Hazen, W. B., and Indians, 507. 

Helena, mining camp, 453. 

Henderson, Archibald, study of frontier, 
24n., 83n., 90n. 

Henderson, Richard, Transylvania, 27, 29, 
30, 88; Nashville, 30. 

Henry, Patrick, and Clark’s expedition, 37. 

Herkimer, Nicholas, Oriskany, 35. 

Hickory Ground, Jackson’s fort, treaty, 175. 

Hicksites, 342. 

Hill, J. J.. Great Northern, 545. 


INDEX 


Hinsdale, B. A.; study of Northwest, 71n.; 
on frontier posts, 82. 

Hodder, F. H., on Douglas’s motive, 434. 

Holladay, Ben, overland mail, 466. 

Homesteads, exemption, 354, 383, 399; de- 
mand for public-land policy, 384, 478; bill - 
(1860), veto, 478; act, 479; and preémp- 
tion, 479, 549; effect of act, 549. 

Hoosiers, 194. 

Horseshoe Bend, battle, 175. 

Hough, Emerson, on cowboy, 538. 

Houses, frontier, 114. 

Howard, O. O., and Nez Percés, 508. 

Howe, Sir William, and Burgoyne’s cam- 
paign, 35. 

Hudson’s Bay Company, Fort Garry, 214, 
331; Oregon Country, 335. 

Hulbert, A. B., on Braddock’s expedition, 
20; study of frontier, 18., 20n., 65n. 

Hull, William, governor, 141;in War of 1812, 
171-73. 

Humanitarianism, movements, 342. 

Humboldt River, trail, 366. See also Cali- 
fornia Trail. 

Huntington, C. P., Central Pacific, 468. 

Hunt's Merchants’ Magazine, on telegraph 
and panic, 441. 

Huntsville, Ala., settlement center, 174, 209. 

Hutchins, Thomas, public-land survey, 63. 

Hutchinson, Kan., cow town, 538. 


Idaho, mining camps, 451; territory, bound- 
aries, 455; divided, 455; Nez Percé war, 
508; Washington and panhandle, 557; 
admission, 563. See also Rocky Moun- 
tain. 

Illinois colonial scheme, 22; Clark’s expedi- 
tion, 33, 36-39, 42; territory, boundaries, 
148, 162; population (1810), 191; (1820), 
192; (1830-40), 313; river towns, 194; 
statehood, boundaries, constitution, 197, 
567; slavery question, 198; Egypt, 199; 
and Bank of United States, 236; canal 
routes and system, 270, 273; squatters and 
Black Hawk War, 288-90; boom in north- 
ern, 311; internal-improvement schemes, 
debt, 313; debt and emigration, 393; debt 
and attempted dismemberment, 393; 
Illinois Central, 418-21; regulation of rail- 
ways and elevators, 528. See also North- 
west. 

Illinois and Michigan Canal, land grant, 272; 
construction, 273; right of way, 418. 

Illinois Central Railroad, project, 418-20; 
land grant, 421. 

Illinois River, canal route, 270. 

Immigration, colonial races and Americani- 
zation, 1-5, 7, 8, 11, 17, 32; Wisconsin 
settlers, 397. 

Imperialism, or Americanization, 8; after 
French and Indian War, 8; and procla- 


INDEX 585 


mation of 1763, 11; American theory, 564. 
See also Territorial governments. 

Implied powers, doctrine, frontier attitude, 
153.5237} 238) 

Independence, Mo., Santa Fé trade, 326; as 
Far West gateway, 331; Mormons, 341, 
344. 

Indian cessions, Iroquois (1768), 13; (1784), 
61; southern (1768), 14; to colonial sub- 
jects, 28; Transylvania (1775), 29; North- 
west (1785), 61; (1789), 75; (1795), 78; 
Indian attitude, 75, 163, 508; in Indiana, 
Fort Wayne Treaty (1809), repudiation, 
161-63, 192; results of War of 1812, 173; 
in Southwest to 1812, 174; Hickory Ground 
Treaty (1814), 175; in establishing per- 
manent frontier (1825), 278, 282; Black 
Hawk, in Iowa (1832), 290; further upper 
Mississippi Valley (1832-33), 290; (1837), 
293; Sioux in Minnesota (1851), fraud, 
424, 425, 486; first trans-Missouri, frauds 
(1853), 431; Arapahoe. and Cheyenne 
(1861), 447, 488; Great Plains treaties 
(1867-68), 505, 506; Nez Percé (1856), 
508; treaty system abolished, 509. See 
also Indians. 

Indian Country. See Indian Territory; 
Indians. 

Indian Intercourse Act, 278. 

Indian Territory, origin, colonization of Five 
Civilized Tribes, 281, 567; during Civil 
War, 485; change from tribal organizations, 
511, 571; remnant of Indian Country, 568; 
other tribes, 568; white intruders, Okla- 
homa, 568, 569; Texan claim, 568; ad- 
mitted as part of Oklahoma, 571. 

Indiana, territory, boundaries, 125; District 
of Louisiana, 141; divided, 141, 162; and 
Wabash River Indian route, 160; Indian 
cessions and repudiation, 161-64, 192; Te- 
cumseh and Tippecanoe, 164-66; growth, 
population (1810-20), 191, 192; river 
towns, 193; Hoosiers, 195; statehood, 
boundaries, constitution, 195-97, 299; 
slavery question, 198; and Bank of United 
States, 236; canal routes and system, 270, 
272, 273, 3138; other internal improve- 
ment schemes, 313; debt and emigra- 
tion, 393; and railroads to Chicago, 
408. See also Northwest. 

Indianapolis, and Chicago, 408, 409. 

Indianapolis and Madison Railroad, 407. 

Indians, policy of proclamation of 1763, 10, 
14, 21, 22; Iroquois as barrier, 13; southern, 
as barrier, 13; encroachments and Dun- 
more’s War, 28; and American Revolution, 
34, 36; land right, 45; and public-land 
survey, 64; British intrigue in Northwest, 
76; Harman’s and Si. Clair’s defeats, 76; 
Wayne’s expedition, 77, 78; evils of white 
contact, 159, 150, 290; belief in continued 


British intrigue, 161, 164, 167; Wabash 
route, 161, 162, 193; Tecumseh’s agitation, 
163-65; and squatters, Black Hawk War, 
164, 288-90; Tippecanoe, effect, 165, 166; 
War of 1812, 172, 173; stand and war in 
Southwest, 174, 175; proposed buffer state, 
176; frontier ports after War of 1812, 179, 
213, 214, 275, 338; policy of permanent 
western home, 214, 276, 277, 341; rise of 
necessity of policy, 275; carrying out 
policy, elements, 277-79; Bureau, 277; 
line and sections of permanent frontier, 
279-83; removal of southern Indians, 281; 
support of policy, 283, 284; recession of 
northern section, 283, 290, 292, 292; pro- 
posed frontier road, 284; distribution 
(1837), 284; removal as frontier advertise- 
ment, 311; permanent frontier policy aban- 
doned, 323, 329, 340, 424; and Santa Fé 
traders, 327; Canada and Mexico and 
frontier, 331; undisturbed beyond the 
Missouri, 423; and emigrants on plains, 
425; council at Fort Laramie (1850), 426; 
frauds in administration, 426, 432; agri- 
culture crosses frontier, 426; country as 
obstacle to Pacific railroad, 427, 431, 433; 
treaties violating policy, fraud, 431, 432, 
white invasion of Platte-Arkansas range, 
442, 447, 488; and Confederate intrigue; 
485, 486; Sioux Warin Minnesota, 485-88; 
Cheyenne-Arapahoe War, 489-91; and 
development of northern Great Plains, 
491-93, 505; crisis and inadequate ad- 
ministration, 493; army and treatment, 
493, 504, 506-09; effect of Union Pacific, 
501; tribal basis of treatment ends, its 
results, 502; defects of administration, 
investigation (1865), 502-05; peace com- 
mission, councils and reservations, 505, 
506; Board of Indian Commissioners, 505; 
southern plains troubles (1867-68), 506, 
507; Black Hills, Custer massacre, 507, 
508; Nez Percé War, 508; treaty system 
abolished, 509; policy and end of frontier, 
509; education, 509, 510; and citizenship, 
510; Hayt’s reforms, 511; Dawes Act, land 
in severalty, 511, 571; Burke Act, 512, 
571; problem becomes minor, 512. See 
also Fur trade; Indian cessions. 


Industry, colonial, 2. See also Economic con- 


ditions. 


Ingalls, J. J., as type, 554n.; and Dakota, 


557. 


Internal improvements, constitutional ques- 


tion, 153, 242, 243, 247, 248; and union, 
154; and competition for western market, 
157, 259, 264, 267, 272, 314, 482; Bonus 
Bill, veto, 242; western need and demand, 
243; surveys for ‘military’? and “post” 
roads, 248, 258; river and harbor projects, 
258; army engineers and, 258; federal stock 


586 


subscription, 258; western, as advertise- 
ment, 311; and States in business, 312, 
414; western schemes and State debts, 
313, 314, 392, 393; periods, 401; Chicago 
convention, 411, 412, 439, 477; Polk’s 
river and harbor veto, 412; problem of 
capital, 413, 414; Congress and financing, 
Jackson’s veto, 414; local aid, 415; cor- 
porations and graft, 415; uncertainty of 
investments, 416; absentee ownership, 
416. See also American System; Canals; 
Railroads; Rivers and harbors; Roads. 

Iowa, territory, 286, 293; lead mines, 287; 
Black Hawk Purchase, 290; settlement, 
preémptions, land clubs, 291, 388; early 
counties, 292; in Michigan Territory, 292; 
in Wisconsin Territory, 292; growth, ori- 
gins of settlers, 292, 393, 394; population 
(1836, 1838), 292, 293; (1850), 396; and 
debt-ridden neighbors, 393 ;statehood,con- 
stitution, boundaries, 394-96, 565; agri- 
cultural college, 473; railway monopoly 
and regulation, 528. 

Iowa Band, 394. 

Iowa County, Wis., 287. 

Iowa Indians, cession, 279. 

Trish, in colonies, 5. 

Iroquois Indians, and frontier, 13; and New 
York’s western claim, 52; cession (1784), 
61. 

Irrigation, first federal movement, 571. 

Irving, Washington, book on Bonneville, 333. 

Isolation, as frontier influence, 95, 113; of 
Far West and Pacific Coast, 460; ends, 
549. 


Jackson, Andrew, congressman, 94; character 
of democracy, 127; and Burr, 146, 147; 
major general, 173, 176; Indian war, 174, 
175; invasions of West Florida, Clay’s 
attack, 176, 181, 182, 256; New Orleans, 
176, 177; territorial governor, 183; as 
leader, 241; candidacy (1824), 249, 256; 
(1828), 257; appeal to. West, 250, 255; 
Indian removal, 284; and Texas, 310; bank 
war, 315-18; and nullification, 319; and 
surplus, 320; Specie Circular, 321; and 
Tyler, 352; Mexican claims, 356; public- 
land policy, 385; road veto, 414. 

Jackson, H. H., and Indians, 502. 

Jacksonian Democracy, frontier elements, 
250-52, 255, 257; and nationalism, 319; 
loses grasp on Northwest, 394, 400. 

James, J. A., study of frontier, 36n. 

James River, frontier route, 23. 

Jay, John, peace negotiations, 41; and navi- 
gation of the Mississippi, 60, 84; British 
negotiations, 80, 107. 

Jefferson, Thomas, and frontier policy, re- 
port of 1784, 61-63; and France, 81; and 
rise of Jeffersonian Democracy, 103-09; 


INDEX 


and Whiskey Insurrection, 107; president, 
110; and St. Clair, 125, 127; character of 
democracy, 127; theories and responsibility, 
130; and Louisiana Purchase, 131-34; and 
Lewis and Clark expedition, 134-38; and 
Burr’s project, 147; and foreign aggression, 
170. 

Jefferson, Territory of, career, 444-46. 

Jeffersonian Democracy, rise, 103-10; 
frontier background of period, 111; in 
Northwest Territory, 124. 

Jeffersonville, Ind., distributing 
193. 

Jesuits, in Lower California, 361. 

Johnson, Andrew, veto of statehood bills, 
457, 458, 555. 

Johnson, Sir William, French War, 19; and 
western colonies, 23. 

Johnston, A. S., Mormon War, 462. 

Jones, G. W., and Wisconsin Territory, 292; 
and Iowa Territory, 293. 

Joseph, Nez Percé chief, war, 508. 

Judah, T. D., Pacific railroad, 469. 

Judiciary, American idea, 98, 100; Ohio, 127. 


center, 


Kankakee River, canal route, 270. 

Kansas, territory, 434, 435; conflict, 435, 436; 
population (1860), 436; creature of politics, 
442: Colorado gold rush, 4438; Territory of 
Jefferson, 444-46; Colorado cut off, 446; 
constitution, statehood, 448; during Civil 
War, 484; cattle quarantine, 542; continued 
territorial characteristics, 554. See also 
Great Plains. 

Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Douglas’s motive, 
433, 434, two territories, 434; passage, 
result, 435. 

Kansas Pacific Railroad, construction, 501. 
Kaskaskia, and Quebec Act, 35; Clark’s 
capture, 38; river town, 194. 

Kaskaskia Indians, cessions, 
western settlement, 282. 

Kaw Indians, cession, 278. 

Kearney, Neb. See Fort Kearney. 

Kearny, S. W., New Mexico expedition, 358; 
march to California, 359; in California, 
368, 369. 

Kellogg, L. P., frontier papers, 28n. 

Kendall, Amos, and Bank, 317. 

Kenosha (Southport), Wis., ambition, 291, 
439. 

Kentucke Gazette, 94. 

Kentucky, settlement, Transylvania, 27-30, 
88; Clark’s expedition and settlement, 38; 
Virginia land warrants, 53; Virginia’s claim 
and statehood, 54; population (1790-1800), 
73; and union, Spanish intrigue, 84, 85, 
90, 91; county, 89; development, 89, 94; 
constitution, admission, 90; suffrage, 100; 
early banks, 230, 232; and Bank of United 
States, 237; Bank of the Commonwealth 


192, 432; 


INDEX 


and stay and tender, 239, 240. See also 
Southwest. 

Keokuk, Iowa, founding, 291. 

Kickapoo Indians, and Fort Harmar Treaty, 
75; cessions, 162, 192, 482; western settle- 
ment, 282. 

King, Rufus, British convention, 138. 

King’s Mountain, battle, 40. 

Kino, Eusebio, in Arizona, 361. 

Kiowa Indians, Medicine Creek Council, 
505, 506. 

Kirtland, Ohio, Mormons, 3438. 

Knoxville, Ky., founding, territorial capital, 
92; railroad convention, 314, 411. 


Laclede, Pierre, St. Louis, 83. 

Lake Champlain, route, 13, 34. 

Lake of the Woods, boundary west of, 180. 

Lake Superior and Mississippi River Rail- 
road, 519. 

Lancaster Pike, 151. 

Land, as frontiersman’s chief problem, 45; 
institutional influence on frontier, 118, 186; 
frontier private sales, 118; Indian holdings 
in severalty, 511, 571. See also Agriculture; 
Public lands. 

Land Clubs of Iowa, 388. 

Laramie, Wy. See Fort Laramie. 

Larkin, T. O., instructions, 355; papers, 
355n.; report on gold, 374. 

Last Chance Gulch, gold rush, 453. 

Lawrence, Kan., Quantrill’s sack, 485. 

Lawrenceburg, Ind., distributing center, 193. 

Lea, Luke, Bank of Tennessee, 231. 

Lead mines, 138, 287. 

Leavenworth, Henry, Fort Snelling, 214. 

Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Stage and 
Express Company, 444. 

Lee, J. D., Mountain Meadows massacre, 
463. 

Legislature, American idea, 98, 100; Ohio 
provision, 127. - 

Lewis, Meriwether, transfer of upper Louis- 
jana, 134, 136; expedition, 134-38. 

Lewis and Clark expedition, first motive, 
134, 185; instructions, carrying out and 
results, 135-38; and Oregon claim, 180. 

Lewiston, Id., founding, 451; seat of govern- 
ment, 455. 

Lexington, Ky., population (1800), 113. 

Lexington Insurance Company, as bank, 230. 

Liebig, Baron, and agricultural advance, 
473. 

Lincoln, Abraham, and Mexican War, 357; 
and need of new States, 456, 457; and Sioux 
prisoners, 488; and Pacific railroad grant, 
496. 

Lincoln, Levi, and Louisiana Purchase, 132. 

Little Crow, Minnesota war, 485-88. 

Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, Blaine 
scandal, 516. 


587 


Little Turtle, and St. Clair and Wayne, 77; 
78. 

Livingston, R. R., Louisiana Purchase, 132- 
34. 

Logan, James, on Scotch-Irish, 4. 

Lomax, J. A., on cowboy, 538. 

Long, James, in Texas, 305. 

Long, 8S. H., Fort Smith, 213; Fort Snelling, 
214; exploration, 215-17. 

Long drive in cow country, 538, 542; demand 
for federal trail, 543. 

Losantiville, 72. 

Louisiana, territorial government, 141; con- 
stitution and admission, 148. 

Louisiana, District and Territory of, 141. 

Louisiana Purchase, retrocession to France, 
131; Jefferson’s dilemma, 131, 132; ne- 
gotiations and treaty, 132-34; boundaries, 
134, 140, 148, 149, 183-85; ratification, 
134; transfer, 134, 136; first motive of 
Lewis and Clark expedition, 134, 135; 
carrying out of expedition, 135-38; Pike’s 
Mississippi expedition, 138; people, 140; 
division and territorial government, 141; 
Pike’s western expedition, purpose, 141- 
43; Burr’s project, 144-48. 

Louisville, Ky., founded, 38, 89; Portland 
Canal, 414. 

Lowell, F. C., cotton manufacture, 245. 

Lowell, J. R., and Mexican War, 357. 

Lower California, Spanish occupation, 361. 

Lumber, Wisconsin frontier, 293. 

Lynch law, in western territories, 559. 


McCabe, J. D., on granger movement, 530. 

McCaleb, W. F., study of Burr, 147n. 

McCormick, Cyrus, reaper, 476. 

McCormick, Robert, and reaper, 475. 

McCulloch vs. Maryland, 237. 

McIntosh, Lachlan, and Indians, 36. 

Mack, J. G. D., acknowledgment to, 31ln. 

Mackenzie, Alexander, exploration, 180. 

McKnight, Robert, Santa Fé trade venture, 
326. 

McLane, Louis, and deposits, 317. 

McLaughlin, A. C., studies of democracy, 
102n., 485n. 

McLoughlin, John, and Americans, 336. 

McMaster, J. B., as historian, 64n., 133n., 
172n. 

Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad, 271, 407. 

Madison, James, West Florida, 149; and 
foreign aggression, 170; and war, 170; 
army officers, 171; Bonus Bill veto, 242. 

Madison, Wis., seat of government, 293; as 
settlement center, 397. 

Madisonville, La., road, 209. 

Mahoning River, canal route, 269. 

Mail. See Post Office. 

Maine, in 1763, 12; statehood, 218. 

Majors, Alexander, pony express, 465, 466. 


588 


Manhattan Company, as bank, 230. 

Manifest destiny, belief, 252. See also 
Expansion. 

Manitowoc, Wis., ambition, 291. 

Manufactures, colonial, 3; conditions (1816), 
244, 245; rise, 244; position before Civil 
War, 440. See also Tariff. 

Manypenny, G. W., on Indian frontier, 424; 
and breaking of Indian frontier, 431, 432. 

Marcy, W. H., Democratic leader, 433. 

Marietta, Ohio, settled, 71, 72. 

Marshall, J. W., discovers gold, 372. 

Marshall, John, French mission, 108; Burr 
trial, 148; and implied powers, 153, 237, 
238. 

Marshall, Texas, cow town, 536. 

Martin, M. L., and Wisconsin Territory, 292. 

Maryland, territorial losses, boundary con- 
troversies, 15, 16, 48, 49; and western 
claims, 48, 49; and Bank of United States, 
FY 

Mason, R. B., report on gold, 374. 

Mason and Dixon’s line, 49. 

Massachusetts, and Vermont, 12, 13; claim 
in New York, 52, 54; western claim and 
cession, 54; New Hampshire boundary, 
87; and admission of Maine, 218. 

Maumee River, canal route, 270. 

Mavericks, origin of name, 537. 

Maxwell, William, newspaper, 94. 

Maysville Turnpike Bill, veto, 414. 

Meat, early industry, 534; development, ele- 
ments, 536, 540; regulation, 541. See also 
Cow country. 

Mechanical education, in Morrill Act, 474. 

Medicine Creek Council, 505. 

Memphis, Tenn., as gateway, 93; southern 
railroad convention, 402, 406, 411; as 
Pacific railroad, 429. 

Memphis and Charleston Railroad, 406. 

Menominee Indians, range, 282, 283. 

Merry, Anthony, and Burr, 145. 

Methodist Church, and frontier, 116, 117; 
Oregon missionaries, 335. 

Mexican War, expectation and preparations, 
354-56; outbreak, 357; popular attitude, 
357; unpreparedness, commands, 357; 
campaigns, 358; Kearny’s New Mexican 
expedition, 358; his march to California, 
359; Slidell’s mission, 359; peace negotia- 
tions, 359; conquest of California, 367-69. 

Miami Canal, building, land grant, 271, 272. 

Miami Exporting Company, as bank, 129, 
230. 

Miami Indians, and Fort Harmar Treaty, 
75; cessions, 162, 432; western settlement, 
282. 

Michigan, territory, 141, 162; population 
(1810), 191; (1820), 192; (1830-40), 298, 
302; early bank, 230; statehood, constitu- 
tion, boundaries, 286, 298, 299, 302; terri- 


INDEX 


tory enlarged, 291; territory divided, 292; 
slow beginnings, 297; agricultural college, 
473. See also Northwest. 

Michigan Central Railroad, line to Chicago, 
408. 

Michigan City, Ind., ambition, 439. 

Michigan Southern Railroad, line to Chicago, 
408. 

Michilimackinac, army post, 171. 

Miles, N. A., and Nez Percés, 509. 

Miles City, Mon., cow town, 539, 558. 

Military roads, Nashville-Madisonville, 209; 
as solution of constitutional difficulty, 248, 
258; proposed, on Indian frontier, 285. 

Militia, frontier, in war, 19, 37, 39, 174; Ohio 
provision, 127; belief in, 285. 

Milwaukee, canal route, 270; ambition, 291, 
397, 439. 

Mineral Point, Wis., lead mines, 287. 

Miners’ Bank of Dubuque, 292. 

Mining, lead, 138, 287; California gold rush, 
372-77; antebellum position, 440; Colo- 
rado gold rush, 441-45; prospectors, 442; 
silver discovery in Nevada, 450; Rocky 
Mountains exploitation, 451-54; develop- 
ment and civil organization, 554. 

Mining law, in California, 373. 

Minnesota, in Wisconsin Territory, 424; 
anomalous status, 424; territory, 424; 
Indian cession, fraud, 425, 486; population 
(1860), 425; statehood, convention, 445; 
territorial fragment, 449; agricultural 
college, 473; Sioux War, 485-88; railway 
monopoly and regulation, 528. 

Missionaries, in Oregon, 335; Catholic, in 
Californias, 361. See also Religion. 

Mississippi, territory, 118; slow develop- 
ment, 173; settlement centers, 174, 209; 
Indian war, 174; growth, routes, 207—09; 
population (1810-50), 209; divided, 210; 
statehood, popular ratification of Consti- 
tution, 210, 566. See also Southwest. 

Mississippi River, question of free navigation, 
60, 83-86, 90, 130, 131; importance in 
frontier development, 82, 130; early trade, 
83; Pike’s exploration, 138; first steam- 
boat, 154-56, as frontier line, 178; as route 
to Southwest, 208; development of com- 
mercial primacy, 156-58, 259, 438, 482, 
483; upper river steamboats, 393; loses 
commercial control, 527. See also Missouri 
River; Ohio River. 

Mississippi Valley, union and disunion forces, 
150, 154; development of upper, 287, 291; 
no longer frontier, 437. See also Appala- 
chian system; Frontier; Great Plains: 
Louisiana Purchase; Northwest; South- 
west, and rivers and States by name. 

Missoula County, Wash. Ter., 452. 

Missouri, District of Louisiana, 141; and 
slavery balance in Senate, 212; territory, 


INDEX 


212; divided, 213; population (1810-20), 
217; (1840), 313; riparian settlement, 217; 
statehood, slavery compromise, 218, 219, 
561, 567; internal improvement schemes, 
debt, 313; first railroads, 413, 438. 

Missouri Compromise, 218; question of vic- 
tory, 219; policy of repeal, 301; repeal, 
435. 

Missouri Indians, western settlement, 282; 
cession (1853), 432. 

Missouri Intelligencer, 217. 

Missouri Pacific Railroad, across Missouri, 
438. 

Missouri River, settlement, 217; fur trade 
and steamboats, 158, 215, 331, 452. 

Mobile, as settlement center, 174, 209. 

Mobile and Ohio Railroad, land grant, 421. 

Mohawk River, frontier route, 4, 113; in 
American Revolution, 35; as trade route, 
260. See also Erie Canal. 

Money. See Currency. 

Monroe, James, and Northwest, 65, 66; 
Louisiana Purchase, 132-34; and Jackson 
in Florida, 182; and internal improvements, 
242, 243, 247, 248; Indian policy, 277. 

Montana, transcontinental route, 452; 
Missouri River trade, 452; road to Walla 
Walla, 452; mining camps, 452, 453; in 
Idaho Territory, 455; territory, boundary, 
455; Bozeman Trail, 492, 505; develop- 
ment, 558: statehood movements, 558; ad- 
mission, 560-63. See also Great Plains; 
Rocky Mountain. 

Moose Jaw, Sask., cow town, 539. 

Mormon Trail, 346. 

Mormons, and frontier, 341; establishment, 
342-44; in Missouri and Illinois, mobbed, 
344; trek to Great Salt Lake, 345, 346; 
charges against, polygamy, 347, 348, 570; 
Young’s rule, elements, 346, 570; State of 
Deseret, 349; battalion, 358; and forty- 
niners, 376; and California Trail, 450; war, 
462; Edmunds Act, polygamy abandoned, 
561, 570; amnesty, 571. See also Utah. 

Morrill, J. S., agricultural colleges bill, 473. 

Morrill Act, purpose, 473; Buchanan’s veto, 
474; passage, provisions, 474; result, 475. 

Morrow, Jeremiah, and canal, 268. 

Mountain Meadows, massacre, 463. 

Mowry, Sylvester, Tucson mines, 453. 

Mullan, John, Walla Walla Road, 452. 

Munn vs. Illinois, 531. 

Muskingum River, canal route, 269. 


Napoleon I, and Louisiana, 131-34, 140. 

Nashville, founded, 30; region, 93; popula- 
tion (1800), 113; bank, 230; southern con- 
vention, 379. 

Natchez, Miss., as settlement center, 174. 

Natchez Trace, 208, 209. 

National Greenback party, 525. 


589 


National Road. See Cumberland Road. 

Nauvoo, Ill., Mormons, 344. 

Navy, and Mexican War, 355. 

Nebraska, territory, 433-35; population 
(1860), 486; creature of politics, 442, 456; 
divided, 446, 449; statehood, 458, 562, 565; 
cattle quarantine, 542; continued territo- 
rial characteristics, 554. See also Great 
Plains. 

Nevada, territory, boundaries, 449, 450; sil- 
ver, 450; self-organization, 450; admis- 
sion, political basis, 457, 565. See also 
Rocky Mountain. 

New Albany, Ind., distributing center, 193. 

New Albany and Salem Railroad, use by 
Michigan Central, 408. 

New England, land policy, 59; and American 
System, 244. 

New Hampshire, Massachusetts boundary, 
87; and Vermont, 88. 

New Harmony, Ind., communities, 194. 

New Helvetia, Sutter’s settlement, 365. 

New Madrid, Mo., earthquake, 150. 

New Mexico, Spanish policy, 323, 324; Polk’s 
desire for, 354; Kearny’s occupation, 358; 
Texan claim, 371, 379; territory, 371, 379; 
divided, 446, 454; and Southern Pacific, 
546; and omnibus statehood bill, 560, 561; 
joint statehood declined, 571, 572; ad- 
mission, 572. See also Great Plains; Rocky 
Mountain; Santa Fé Trail. 

New Orleans, right of deposit, 86, 130, 131; 
influence on frontiersmen, 157; battle, 176, 
177; and western trade, 259; and Pacific 
railroad, 429, 546. See also Mississippi 
River. 

New Orleans, river steamboat, 154-56. 

New York, colonial Germans, 4; Vermont 
claim, 12, 13, 88, 89; western claim, cession, 
49, 52; eastern boundary, 51; Massachu- 
setts’ claim, 52, 54; Erie Canal, 260-64, 
296, 298, 311, 406, 527. 

New York Central Railroad, beginnings, 
404; importance, 405; and Erie Canal, 406, 
527. 

New York City, as colonial city, 2; and west- 
ern trade, 259; effect of Erie Canal, 264; 
travel route to St. Louis (1848), 407. 

New York Herald, on Pacific railroad, 494. 

New York Indians, and western settlement, 
282,/432. 

Newspapers, first transappalachian, charac- 
ter, 94; early Missouri, 217; early Iowa, 
292; first California, 374; first mountain 
region, 444. 

Nez Percé Indians, and mining camps, 451; 
war, 508. 

Nicholas, George, Kentucky constitution, 91. 

Niles, Hezekiah, and protection, 245. 

No Man’s Land, local government, 568, 569. 

North American Review, on Great Plains, 214 


590 


North Carolina, upland settlements and dis- 
content, Regulators’ War, 24—26, 31; and 
Tennessee settlements, 30, 31;in American 
Revolution, 39, 40; western claim, juris- 
dictional cession, 56, 91; and Bank of 
United States, 237. 

North Dakota. See Dakota. 

Northern Indiana Railroad, used by Michi- 
gan Southern, 408. 

Northern Pacific Railroad, charter, land 
grant, 514; Jay Cooke and finance, con- 
struction, 517, 519-21; cattle shipments, 
539; Villard’s control and completion, 544, 
545; paralleling lines, 545. See also Pacific 
railroads. 

Northwest, in American Revolution, 36-39; 
in peace negotiations, 42; Virginia’s land 
reserve, 53, 73; Connecticut Reserve, de- 
velopment, cession, 55, 73; Jefferson and 
Ordinance of 1784, 61-63; first Indian 
treaties and troubles, 61, 75, 76; Fort 
Harmar, 61; Ohio Company and grant, 
64-66, 69; territorial Ordinance of 1787, 
65-69; Scioto Associates, 69, 119; officials 
and interlocking interests, 69; Ohio Com- 
pany settlement, 71, 72, 119; organization 
of government, 72; Symmes Purchase, 
Cincinnati, 72, 119; growth, 73; early 
routes, 73; French settlers, Gallipolis, 74; 
St. Clair’s defeat, 76; Wayne’s expedition 
and treaty, 77, 78; frontier posts, British 
evacuation, 79-82; private and public land 
in market, 119; second stage of govern- 
ment, delegate, 121, 124; Jeffersonian 
Democracy, self-government issue, 123, 
124; seat of government, 125; division, 125; 
admission of Ohio, 126-29; later slavery 
questions, 197-200; Yankee tract, 264, 268, 
271, 296, 394, 400; ascendency over South- 
west, 295-97; first Great Lakes steamboat, 
298. Seealso Frontier; Granger movement; 
Illinois; Indiana; Michigan; Mississippi 
Valley; Ohio; Western claims; Wisconsin. 

Nullification, in Kentucky Resolutions, 109; 
movement, 319. 


Ogallala, Kan., cow town, 536, 539. 


Ohio, boundary question, 125, 126, 128, 298, | 


299; enabling act, 126; convention and 
constitution, 127; admission, 128; land 
grants, 129; first banks, regulation, 129, 
230, 232; population (1810-20), 191, 192; 
and Bank of United States, 236; canal 
routes and system, financing, 268-72, 
274, 311, 313; first railroad, 271. See also 
Northwest. 

Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, building, 409. 

Ohio Canal, building and effect, 271, 274, 311. 

Ohio Company, organization and grant, 64— 
67, 69; settlement, 71, 72; and Duer, 74; 
amount of land, 119. 


INDEX 


Ohio Idea, 522, 524. See also Greenback 
movement. 

Ohio Land Company (1748), 17. 

Ohio River, frontier approaches forks, 16-18, 
20; Franco-British contest, 18-20; settle- 
ment below forks, 28; as emigrant route, 
38, 127; towns, 126, 193, 194; Portland 
Canal, 414. See also Mississippi River. 

Oklahoma, squatters, first use of name, 568, 
569; No Man’s Land, 569; opening, 569; 
territory, 569; population (1900), 571; ad- 
mission, 571. See also Indian Territory. 

Oklahoma City, founding, 569. 

Omaha Indians, cessions, 282, 432. 

Omnibus Bill, 560. 

Onis, Luis de, negotiations, 182-85. 

Ordinance of 1784, 61-63. 

Ordinance of 1785, 63. 

Ordinance of 1787, speculative influence and 
passage, 65-67; provisions, 67-69; extra- 
legality, 69; endurance of principles, 564. 
See also Northwest. 

Oregon, self-government, 369; territory, 370; 
divided, 446; statehood, 446; isolation, 
460. See also Oregon Country. 

Oregon Country, claims, 180; joint occupa- 
tion, 181, 334; Spain renounces claim, 185; 
Bonneville’s expedition, 332; Wyeth’s ex- 
pedition, 333; fur trade and missionaries, 
agricultural beginnings, 335; Indian agent 
and Frémont, 336; route to, 336, 337; 
development of migration, 338, 365; 
centers of American settlement, 339; self- 
organization, 339; as political issue, com- 
promise treaty, 339. 

Oregon Trail, development, route, 333, 336, 
337,065; 

Oriskany, battle, 35. 

Orleans, Territory of, 141; becomes Louis- 
iana, 148. 

Osage Indians, cessions, 278, 281. 

Osborn vs. Bank, 237. 

Oto Indians, western settlement, 282; cession 
(1853), 432. 

Ottawa Indians, cession (1784), 61; Chicago 
Council, western settlement, 282, 290. 
Overland route, Mormon Trail, 346; Kear- 

ny’s route, 359; California Trail, 366, 
375; Pike’s Peak line, 444; first mail car- 
riers, 461; freight, 462; Butterfield’s mail 
contract, southern route, 462, 463; equip- 
ment and conditions, 463-65; cost and 
receipts, 465; unexpedited services, 465; 
change to central route, 465; pony express, 
465, 466; telegraph, 466; Holladay, 466; 
business of central route, 466; period, 466; 
Indian attacks, 489. See also Oregon 
Trail; Pacific railroads; Santa Fé Trail. 
Pacific Coast. See California; Oregon; 
Oregon Country; Washington. 


INDEX 


Pacific railroads, beginning of movement, 
413, 422, 427; routes and sectionalism, 
427, 429-31, 4383; obstacles, Indian 
Country, 427, 431, 433; Whitney’s propa- 
ganda, 427, 428; and Kansas-Nebraska 
Bill, 434, 436; surveys, limitation, 430, 
433, 452, 460, 467, 514; early bills, 467; 
choice of means, 468; effect of Civil War, 
469; demand for further charters, 514, 515; 
financial difficulties of later roads, 516, 
517; and frontier, 544, 548; and panic of 
1873, resumption, 544; and sale of public 
lands, 549; voided land grants, 552. See 
also Union Pacific; and other lines by 
name. 

Pakenham, Sir Edward, New Orleans, 177. 

Palmer, W. J., Denver and Rio Grande, 516. 

Palmyra, N.Y., Mormonism, 342. 

Panics, of 1819, effect, 235, 238; of 1837, 321, 
322; western recovery, 392; of 1857 and 
frontier advance, 437, 441, 458; of 1873 
and frontier, 513, 521; causes of 1873 panic, 
520, 521; and Pacific railroads, 544. 

Paper money. See Currency. 

Parish, David, war finances, 235. 

Parkman, Francis, as historian, In. 

Parsons, S. H., Ohio Company, 65, 66; judge, 
69. 

Patrons of Husbandry. See Granger move- 
ment. 

Patterson, T. M., and admission of Colorado, 
DDO. 

Peace of 1783, negotiations, boundaries, 41, 
42, 57, 84; controversies over, 79-82. 

Pembina, N.D., settlers, 449. 

Pennsylvania, colonial Germans, 4; boundary 

% controversies, 15, 28, 49; Erie triangle, 54, 
119; Wyoming, 55; and Cumberland Road, 
151; canal system, 265. 

Pennsylvania Railroad, construction, 406. 

Pensacola, seizure, 176, 182. 

Peoria Indians, western settlement, 282; 
cession (1853), 432. 

Perham, Josiah, and Northern Pacific, 514. 

Pet banks, effect, 317, 318. 

Philadelphia, as colonial city, 2; and western 
trade, 259. 

Phillips, U. B., study of slavery, 202, 204n. 

Phoenix, Ariz., seat of government, 454. 

Piankishaw Indians, cessions and western 
settlement, 162, 192, 282, 432. 

Pierce, Franklin, Kansas, 436; railroad land 
grants, 468. 

Pierre, S. D., See Fort Pierre. 

Pike, Z. M., Mississippi expedition, 138; 
western expedition, 141-43; on New 
Mexico, 324-26. 

**Pike’s Peak or Bust,”’ 443. 

Pinckney, C. C., French mission, 108. 

Pinckney, Thomas, Spanish negotiations, 85. 

Pittsburgh, contest for Fort Duquesne, 18- 


59] 


20; named, 21; in American Revolution; 
39; population (1800), 113. 

Pittsburgh Gazetie, 94. 

Pius Fund, 362. 

Plantation system, and effect, 202-07. 

Plateau region. See Rocky Mountain. 

Platte River Trail. See California Trail; 
Oregon Trail; Union Pacific. 

Plumb, P. B., as typical western senator, 
554n. 

Point Pleasant, battle, 28. 

Politics, inchoate period, 253; cleavage in 
West, 296; frontier trait, 410. See also 
Elections; Jacksonian Democracy; Jeffer- 
sonian Democracy; and parties by name. 

Polk, J. K., Texas and Oregon, 339, 352, 353; 
diary, 354; expansionist, 354, 369; and war 
with Mexico, 354-56, 359; war message, 
359; and government for new possessions, 
369, 370, 377; Oregon Bill, 371; river and 
harbor veto, 412. 

Pony express, 465, 466. 

Pope, John, Sioux War, 487. 

Population, general (1760-90), 2: (1840), 
286; Kentucky and Northwest (1800), 73; 
Kentucky (1792), 91; Tennessee (1790- 
96), 92; increase, elements (1800), 111, 113; 
frontier towns (1800), 113; western (1810), 
191; (1820), 192; southwestern (1810-50), 
209; Missouri (1810-20), 217; (1840), 313; 
Arkansas (1820), 217; (1840), 302; western 
increase and distribution (1840), 286, 295- 
97; Wisconsin and Iowa (1836, 1838), 292, 
293; Michigan (1830-34), 298; (1840), 
302; Illinois (1840), 313; California (1850- 
60), 376; Iowa and Florida (1850), 396; 
Minnesota (1860), 425; Kansas and Ne- 
braska (1860), 486; St. Louis and Chicago 
(1820-80), 438, 489; Colorado (1860), 446; 
and railroad mileage, 548; of territorial 
belt (1860-90), 554; Oklahoma (1900), 
StL: 

Portages, between Great Lakes and Ohio 
basins, 269. 

Porter, D. D., shipment of camels, 459. 

Portland Canal, federal aid, 414. 

Portol4, Gaspar de, in California, 362, 363. 

Posey, Thomas, governor, 191. 

Post office, Franklin and colonial, 8; and 
frontier unionism, 168; post roads as 
solution of constitutional difficulty, 248, 
258. See also Overland route. 

Potawatami Indians, and Fort Harmar 
Treaty, 75; cessions, 162; range, 282; 
Chicago council, western settlement, 283, 
290. 

Potomac River, improvement, canal, 265, 
266. 

Prairie du Chien, Wis., old post, 1388; Fort 
Crawford, 180; Indian treaty (1825), 279, 
282. 


592 


Pratt, R. H., Carlisle School, 510. 

Preémption, squatters and special acts, 291, 
386-88; land clubs, 388-90; general act, 
390, 391; and homesteads, 479, 549. 

Presbyterian Church, and colonial frontier, 
5; and later frontier, schisms, 116-18; 
Oregon missionaries, 335. 

Prescott, F. W., railroad study, 408n. 

Prescott, Ariz., seat of government, 454. 

Proclamation of 1763, provinces, 10, 57; In- 
dian country, effect, 10, 11, 21; neutral 
strip, 13; line overrun, 21, 27; purpose as 
to settlement, 22; and western claims, 51. 

Promontory Point, Utah, last spike, 500. 

Property, Ordinance of 1787 on distribution, 
68; married woman's, 354, 399. 

Prophet, agitation, 163, 165. 

Proprietaries, land policy, 46. 

Prospectors, rise and life of class, 442; in 
Rocky Mountains, 451. 

Prosperity, of fifties, 439-41; of sixties, 513, 
520; end (1873), 521. See also Panics; 
Speculation. 

Protection. See Tariff. 

Public debts, State. for internal improve- 
ments, 313, 314, 392; and western immigra- 
tion, 393; Pacific railroad loan, 469, 495, 
514, 515; Jay Cooke and war-time, 517-19; 
payment and greenback movement, 522- 
25. 

Public lands, colonial speculation, 17; cabin 
right, 25, 46; as union bond, 43, 45, 49, 50, 
58; crown acquirement from Indians, 45; 
colonial administration, 46; early States 
and, as asset, 46; as political problem of 
Revolutionary era, 47; Revolutionary 
warrants, 53, 60, 73; colonial systems and 
federal policy, 59, 60; Ordinance of 1785, 
first surveys, 63, 118; retention of con- 
gressional control, 69; large private sales, 
119; Hamilton’s report, 120; first general 
law (1796), 120; Harrison’s amendment 
(1800), credit, local offices, 121; grants to 
States, 129; deferred taxation on pur- 
chased, 129; road grants, 151; War of 1812 
bounty land, 189; domain considered 
available for States (1819), 211, 212; de- 
velopment of offices and sales to 1821, 220, 
221; General Land Office, 220; average 
price, 221; reduction of sales unit, 221, 
224; results of credit system, relief acts, 
222; free-land policy, basis, 223, 224; net 
revenue, 223; act of 1820, credit abolished, 
price, 224; inadequate speed of surveying, 
224; canal grants, 272, 418; squatters on 
Indian lands, special preémption acts, 291, 
386-88; sales and revenue in thirties, 319; 
Specie Circular, 321; and Webster-Hayne 
debate, 381; and sectionalism, 381, 382; 
policy of cession to States, 383; and of do- 
nation to settlers, 383; graduation policy, 


INDEX 


384; distribution of proceeds, 384-86; pre- 
emptioner land clubs, 388; distribution- 
preémption act, result, 390, 391; right of 
way to railroads, 417; grants to railroads, 
amount, 418, 421, 468; ideasin grants for in- 
ternal improvements, 420; fiction of grant 
to States for improvements, 421, 470; 
Indian cession (1853) and sales, 432; 
Pacific railroad grants, 469, 514, 515; last 
stand against wide-open policy, 471; agri- 
cultural colleges’ grant, 473-75; extent of 
educational grants, 474; synchronism in . 
history, 477; inconsistencies in western 
demands, 478; rise of homestead policy, 
478; homestead bills and act, 478, 479; pre- 
emption and homesteads, 479; last period, 
480; end of grants to railroads, 515; free 
grass and cattle industry, 541; fencing, 
illegality, 542, 551; Pacific railroads and 
sale, 549; choice in procurement, 549; 
effect of Homestead Act, 549; insufficient 
laws for special uses, 551; frontier attitude, 
552; railroad encroachments, voiding 
grants, 552; end of free farming land, 554; 
Oklahoma rush, 569; irrigation movement, 
571. See also Indian cessions; Western 
claims. 

Public utilities, absentee ownership, 97, 416; 
special laws and graft, 415; rise of State 
regulation, 528, 531; regulation as western 
movement, 532. See also Banks; Internal 
improvements. 

Putnam, Rufus, and western lands, Ohio 
Company, 60, 64, 71; land survey, 64. 


Quakers, split, 342. 

Qualifications for office, frontier idea, 100. 

Quantrill, W. C., raid, 485. 

Quapaw Indians, western settlement, 282. 

Quarantine, cattle, 540, 542. 

Quebec, British province, 10; enlargement, 
27, 35; in American Revolution, 34. 

Quebee Act, 27, 35; legality ignored, 51. 

Quit-rent, colonial policy, 46. 


Racine, Wis., ambition, 439. 

Railroads, beginning, 266, 404; first west- 
ern, 271, 407; early State schemes, 313; 
southern conventions, 314, 402, 411; pro- 
jected Charleston-Cincinnati line, 314, 
406, 411; beginning of period, 401; Amer- 
ica and development, 403; direction of 
early, 404; city connections, through lines, 
404; early northern trunk lines, 405, 406; 
southern trunk lines, 406; first Lake Erie- 
Ohio River connection, 407; dominance 
over water routes, 407, 482; race for 
Chicago, 407, 408; first lines west of 
Chicago, 408; connection of western cities, 
409, 439; and agricultural frontier, 409, 
423; financing western, problem of capital, 


INDEX 


412-17; St. Louis convention, 412; first 
Missouri lines, 413, 438; physical problems, 
416; right of way through public lands, 
417; first land grant to aid, 418, 421; and 
last phase of frontier, 426, 512, 513; mile- 
age and prosperity, 439; development and 
end of land grants, 468, 515; development 
and public land policy, 478; mileage (1860-— 
80), 517; transportation as tax in West, 
526; monopoly of western transportation, 
526-28; State regulation, 528; granger 
movement, 528-30; attitude toward regu- 
lation, 531; granger decisions, effect on 
American polity, 531; and cow country, 
533, 536, 540, 541; mileage and population, 
548; time zones, 548; encroachment on 
public lands, voiding of grants, 552. See 
also Internal improvements; Pacific rail- 
roads. 

Raisin River, battle, 172. 

Ramsey, Alexander, governor, 
council, 425. 

Randolph, John, and American System, 255; 
attack on Clay, 257. 

Ratification of Federal Constitution, frontier 
attitude, 101. 

Reaper, invention, result, 475-78. 

Recall of judges, and admission of Arizona, 
572. 

Red Cloud, and Bozeman Trail, 492, 505. 

Red Jacket, Fort Stanwix Treaty, 61. 

Red River, removal of raft, 300. 

Reed, T. B., as Speaker, 563. 

Refrigeration, and meat industry, 536, 540. 

Regina, Sask., cow town, 539. 

Regulators’ War, 25. 

Religion, frontier brand, churches, revivals, 
115-17, 410; missionaries in Oregon, 335; 
period of ferment, 341. See also Mormons. 

Remington, Frederick, on cowboy, 538. 

Representation, inequitable, 25, 31. 

Repudiation of State debts, 393. 

Resumption Act, 525. 

Revenue. See Surplus revenue. 

Revivals, frontier, 117. 

Reynolds, John, Black Hawk War, 289; Fort 
Armstrong Council, 290. 

Rhodes, J. F., on Douglas’s motive, 434; on 
Crédit Mobilier, 499. 

Rice, David, Kentucky synod, 116. 

Richmond, Ind., as frontier point, 192. 

Richmond, Va., railroad connection, 406. 

Riegel, R. E., railroad study, 408n. 

Riley, Bennett, Santa Fé trade escort, 328; 
in California, 377. 

Rio Grande River, Sibley’s offensive, 483. 

River and harbor bills, early, 258; removing 
river obstructions, 300; Polk’s veto, 412; 
character, 414. 

Rivers, as colonial frontier routes, 5, 12, 13, 
113. See also adjoining titles; Canals; 


Indian 


593 


Steamboats; and streams by name, espe- 
cially Mississippi; Missouri; Ohio. 

Rivers and Harbors Convention at Chicago 
(1847), 411, 412, 439, 477. 

Rives, G. L., study of Texas, 303. 

Road Survey Bill, 248, 258. 

Roads, land grants to States for, 129, 151; 
frontier demand, 151, 194; period of turn- 
pikes, 151; proposed federal fall-line road, 
208, 209; Nashville-Madisonville military 
road, 209; military and post, as solution of 
constitutional question, 248, 258; proposed 
Indian frontier, 285; Jackson’s veto, 414; 
Fort Benton to Fort Walla Walla, 452. 
See also Cumberland Road; Internal im- 
provements. ! 

Robertson, James, career, as leader, 26, 93; 
Transylvania, 29; Nashville, 30, 93. 

Robidoux, , and California, 365. 

Rock River, canal route, and land grant, 
270, 272. 

Rocky Mountain and Plateau region, as bar- 
rier, 446; mineral exploitation, 446, 451— 
54; creation and revision of territories, 
448, 454-56, 554; camel corps, 459. See also 
Explorations; Great Plains, and its cross 
references; Mormons; Oregon Country; 
and States by name. 

Rocky Mountain News, 444; on Territory 
of Jefferson, 445. 

Rollins, P. A., on cowboy, 538. 

Roosevelt, N. J., Mississippi River steam- 
boat, 154-56. 

Roosevelt, Theodore, study of frontier, 24n.; 
as ranchman, 539; Oklahoma, 571. 

Round-up, 537. 

Routes, Connecticut River, 12; from Can- 
ada, 18, 34; around southern Indians, 
14; Potomac-Ohio, 17, 19; Susquehanna- 
Ohio, 20; to headwaters of the Tennessee, 
24; Monongahela-Wheeling trail, 28; to 
Kentucky, 29, 38; Wabash, 38; Zane’s 
Trace, 73; condition of frontier trails 
(1800), 114, 150; of migration to Northwest, 
127, 193, 287, 292, 298, 396, 397; Indian, 
from Gulf to Canada, 161, 193; southwest- 
ern, 174, 208, 209; portages to Ohio basin, 
269; of trans-Mississippi settlers, 299, 393; 
Kearny’s, to California, 359; search for 
Pacific, 366; of forty-niners, 375; northern 
transcontinental, 452; Bozeman Trail, 
492, 505. See also California Trail; Explo- 
rations; Internal improvements; Oregon 
Trail; Santa Fé Trail; Overland route. 

Royce, C. C., Indian cession maps, 75n. 

Rush, Richard, boundary negotiations, 180. 

Russell, Majors, and Waddell, pony express, 
465, 466. 

Russia, American claim, 180, 335; Cali- 
fornia, 363, 365. 

Ryan, E. G., granger decision, 53L 





594 


St. Clair, Arthur, as territorial governor, 
interlocking interests, 70, 72, 123-25; and 
Cincinnati, 72; Indian negotiations, 75; 
Indian expedition, 76; dismissed, 127. 

St. Croix River, as boundary, 12. 

St. Joseph, Mich., ambition, 439. 

St. Leger, Barry, Mohawk operations, 35. 

St. Louis, founding, 83; transfer of upper 
Louisiana, 134, 136; fur trade, 212; de- 
velopment, 212, 437, 438; travel route to 
New York (1848), 407; first railroad 
connections, 409, 438, 439; railroad con- 
vention, 412; and Pacific railroad, 429; 
population (1820-80), and Chicago, 4388, 
439. 

St. Stephens, Ala., settlement, 174. 

Salmon River, mining camps, 451. 

Salt springs, grant to States, 129. 

San Antonio, Tex., Alamo, 310. 

San Diego, Cal., settled, 362. 

San Francisco, settlement, 363; named, 372. 

San Francisco Bay, discovered, 363. 

San Ildefonso Treaty, 131. 

San Jacinto, battle, 310. 

San Lorenzo el Real Treaty, 85, 86. 

Sand River Reserve, 489; attack on, 490. 

Sandusky, Ohio, and canal and railroad, 271, 
407; growth, 298. 

Sandusky River, canal route, 269. 

Santa Anna, A. L. de., and Texas, 309, 310. 

Santa Fé Trail and trade, New Mexico as 
possible market, 143, 324, 325; McKnight’s 
attempt (1811), 326; Becknell’s inaugura- 
tion, 326; conditions, protection, 326-28; 
routes, 328, 329; trade beyond, 329; 
volume and significance, 329. 

Sauk and Fox Indians, cessions, 192, 279, 
290, 432; range, 282, 283; and squatters, 
288; Black Hawk War, 289. 

Savannah, Ga., as cotton port, 207. 

Schofield, J. M., and Quantrill, 485. 

Scioto Associates, as hold-up, grant, 66-68; 
and French settlers, 64; failure, 119. 

Scioto River, canal route, 269. 

Scotch-Irish, colonial frontiersmen, 4. 

Scott, Winfield, on officers in War of 1812, 
171; Black Hawk War, 289; Fort Arm- 
strong Council, 290; Mexican War, 357, 
358; and Trist, 359; and Chicago, 439. 

Secession, impossibility of success, 302; 
threat (1850), 379; effect of Compromise 
of 1850, 483; Border States and, 482. 

Sectionalism, within States, and representa- 
tion, 25, 31; development and frontier as 
edge, 204—07; and slavery, 254, 258; and 
rapid growth of West, 287; on public-land 
question, 381, 382; Douglas and solution, 
420; and Pacific railroad route, 429-31. 
See also Union. 

Self-confidence, as frontier trait, 96. 


Self-government, frontier autonomy, in- 


INDEX 


stances, 7, 25, 27, 30-32, 97, 339, 349, 350, 
877, 444-46, 450, 569; and admission of 
States, 87; and determination of constitu- 
tionality, 98; electorate as final authority, 
98; frontier and expansion, 100; issue in 
Northwest Territory, 123, 124. 

Seminole Indians, location, 14; and frontier 
advance, 174; removal, war, 281, 396. 

Senate, slavery balance, 211, 212, 301, 351, 
434, 

Seneca Chief, opens Erie Canal, 263. 

Seneca Indians, western settlement, 282. 

Serra, Junfpero, in California, 362. 

Sevier, John, career, as leader, 27, 93; State 
of Franklin, 31; King’s Mountain, 40; 
Spanish intrigue, 93; governor, 94. 

Shawnee Indians, and Fort Harmar Treaty, 
75; western settlement; 282; cession (1853), 
432. 

Shawneetown, Ill., distributing center, 194. 

Shelby, Isaac, Dunmore’s War, 28; King’s 
Mountain, 40. 

Shenandoah Valley, settlement, 23. 

Sheridan, P. H., and Indians, 506, 507. 

Sherman, W. T., on Colorado gold rush, 444; 
on Pacific railroad, 460. 

Shoshoni Indians, treaty and reservation, 
505. 

Shreve, H. M., snag boat, 300. 

Sibley, Henry Hastings, delegate, 424; Sioux 
War, 487. 

Sibley, Henry Hunter, Rio Grande offensive, 
483. 

Silver, Nevada discovery, 450. 

Sioux Indians, and Pike, 138; trans-Mis- 
sissippi movement, 279, 282, 283, 293; 
Minnesota cession, defrauded, 425, 486; 
Fort Laramie Council (1850), range, 426; 
war in Minnesota, 485-88; and mining 
camps and Bozeman Trail, 491-93, 505; 
Grattan episode, 491; Fetterman ambush, 
493; Black Hills reservation, 505; Black 
Hills troubles, Custer massacre, 507, 508. 

Slater, Samuel, cotton manufacture, 245. 

Slavery, Ordinance of 1784, 62; prohibition 
in Ordinance of 1787, 68; in Tennessee, 93; 
question in Northwest, 197-200; unprofit- 
able, expected elimination, 200, 201; effect 
of cotton, 201; plantation system and its 
effect, 202-04; senatorial balance, 211, 
212, 218, 301; frontier and question, 211; 
Missouri Compromise, 218; and sectional- 
ism, 254, 258; policy of repeal of Missouri 
Compromise, 301; unrealized economic 
decline, 301; and settlement of Texas, 303; 
balance and Texas, 351; and Far West, 
Compromise of 1850, 370, 371, 378-80; 
reason for territorial agitation, 380; propa- 
ganda and railroad extension, 426, 429; 
and violation of Indian policy, 432; finality 
of Compromise of 1850, 433; Kansas- 


INDEX 


Nebraska Bill; 433-35; Kansas conflict, 
435, 436; and territorial governments, 445. 

Slidell, John, Mexican mission, 359. 

Sloat, J. D., instructions, 355; in California, 
368. 

Smet, P. J. de, in Oregon, 335. 

Smith, D. A., Canadian Pacific, 545. 

Smith, Hyrum, killed, 344. 

Smith, J. H., study of Texas, 303; on Mexi- 
can War, 351n. 

Smith, Jedediah, ‘California explorations, 
333, 364. 

Smith, Joseph, and Indian line, 341; estab- 
lishment of Mormons, 342; killed, 345; 
polygamy, 348. 

Snake Valley, Nez Percé trouble, 508. 

Social unrest, period, 341. 

Society, frontier, 115. 

South, colonial land policy, 59; and com- 
mercial control over West, 157, 259, 264, 
267, 272, 314, 482; and American System, 
249, 253, 254; and internal improvements, 
313; railroads and conventions, 314, 402, 
406, 411; and public lands, 382. See also 
Civil War; Secession; Slavery. 

South Carolina, southern claim, 55, 57; ces- 
sion of doubtful western claim, 56; Georgia 
boundary settlement, 55; nullification 
movement, 318, 319. 

South Carolina Railroad, 266, 403. 

South Dakota. See Dakota. 

South Pass, discovery, 336, 364. See also 
Oregon Trail. 

Southern Pacific Railroad, land grant, 515; 
California lines, control of coast connec- 
tions, 546, 547; eastward extensions, 546, 
547; consolidation, 548; and Texas Pacific 
land grant, 552. See also Pacific railroads. 

Southwest, Ohio River settlements, 28; slow 
development, 173; cotton, 207; removal of 
Indians, 281; ascendency of Northwest 
over, 295-97. See also Alabama; Ken- 
tucky; Mississippi; Mississippi River; 
Slavery; Tennessee. 

Spain, contest for America, 1; in peace nego- 
tiations (1783), 41; and free navigation 
of the Mississippi, 60, 838-85, 130, 131; 
intrigue, 83-85, 90, 93; Treaty of San Lo- 
renzo el Real, 85, 86; cedes Louisiana to 
France, 131; and Louisiana Purchase, 140- 
44, 183-85; West Florida, 148, 149; 
Florida negotiations, 181-83; Texas, 303- 
05; northern American provinces, 323-26; 
California, 361-63. 

Spanish America, recognition, 182, 183, 185. 

Specie Circular, 321. 

Specie payments, suspensions, 232, 623; 
Specie Circular, 321; resumption, 525. See 
also Currency. 

Speculation, colonial land, 17; plans for 
western colonies, 22; Yazoo, 57; and pas- 


595 


sage of Northwest Ordinance, 66; and Span- 
ish intrigue, 93; zenith (1836), 314; effect 
of pet banks, 318; effect of government 
surplus, 320; railroad towns, 497. See also 
Finance. 

Squatters, rights, 46; dispossessed in North- 
west, 64; persistence, 164; on Sauk and 
Fox lands, 288-90. See also Preémption. 

Stage travel. See Overland route. 

Stanford, Leland, Central Pacific, 468. 

State sovereignty, original, 168; and public 
lands, 382. See also Union. 

States. See Admission; Union. 

Stay and tender acts, after panic of 1819, 239, 
240. 

Steam, revolution, 403. 

Steamboats, first on Mississippi, 154-56; de- 
velopment of era of river, 156, 158, 438; 
Missouri River, 215, 331, 452; first lake, 
298; upper Mississippi River, 393; travel 
on, 394. 

Steele, R. W., territorial governor, 445. 

Steubenville, Ohio, and Cumberland Road, 
152. 

Stevens, I. I., and northern route for Pacific 
railroad, 452, 514. 

Stewart, W. M., inaccurate reminiscences, 
457n. 

Stockton, R. F., in California, 368, 369. 

Stone, A. H., and history of slavery, 202. 

Strong, M. M., and Wisconsin constitution; 
399. 

Sublette, Milton, fur trader, 333. 

Sublette, William, fur trade expedition, 
Boos 

*‘Suckers,’’ 287. 

Suffrage. See Franchise. 

Sumner, Charles, and Colorado, 457. 
Supreme Court, Fletcher vs. Peck, 57; federal- 
bank decisions, 237; granger cases, 531. 
Surplus revenue, problem, 319, 320; distribu- 
tion, effect, 320; distribution of public- 

land proceeds, 384-86, 390, 391. 

Survey, of public lands, system, 63; inade- 
quate, 224; of Pacific railroad routes, 430, 
433, 452, 460, 467, 514. 

Sutter, J. A., in California, 364; and dis- 
covery of gold, 372. 

Sycamore Shoals, treaty, 29. 

Symmes, J. C., purchase and settlement, 72; 
amount of land, 119; grant and preémp- 
tion act, 387. 


Taft, W. H., and Arizona, 572. 

Taliaferro, Lawrence, Fort Snelling Treaty, 
293. 

Tallahassee Railway, right of way, 418. 

Tallmadge, James, and Missouri, 218. 

Taney, R. B., removal of deposits, 317. 

Tariff, of 1824, American System, 244-49, 
881; of 1816, 245; sectionalism, 318; nullifi- 


596 


cation movement and compromise of 1833, 
319; of 1842, 391; of 1846, 412. 

Taylor, Zachary, in Texas, 355; Mexican 
War, 357, 358; candidacy, 370; attitude 
towards new possessions, 371, 377. 

Tecumseh, in St. Clair’s defeat, 77; agitation, 
163-65; Tippecanoe, 165, 166; in War of 
1812, death, 172. 

Telegraph, and panic of 1857, 441; transcon- 
tinental, 465. 

Tennessee, Watauga, 25-27, 91; Nashville 
settlement, 30; State of Franklin, 31; 
North Carolina’s cession, 56, 91; Indian 
danger and Spanish intrigue, 85, 93; terri- 
torial government, 91; districts, 92; slav- 
ery, 93; admission, 94; first banks, 230, 
231; and Bank of United States, 237. 
See also Southwest. 

Tennessee River, approach to headwaters, 
24; Watauga, 25-27, 91. 

Terre Haute, Fort Harrison, 165. 

_ Territorial governments, foundation © in 
Ordinanee of 1787, stages, 67-69, 564; 
Territory south of the River Ohio, 92, 118; 
Mississippi, 118; Indiana, 125; Orleans, 
141; Michigan, 141, 162; Louisiana 
(Missouri), 141, 212; Ibinois, 148, 162; 
Florida, 183; Alabama, 210; Arkansas, 211, 
213; Wisconsin, 292; Iowa, 293; Oregon, 
340, 370; Utah and New Mexico, 371, 379; 
detached fragments, 424, 449; Minnesota, 
424; Kansas and Nebraska, 433-35; self- 
ordained Jefferson, 444-46; slavery and 
erection, 445; Washington, 446; Colorado, 
446, 447; creation and revision in mountain 
region, 448, 454-56, 554; Dakota, 448, 
449; Nevada, 449-51; Arizona, 454; Idaho, 
455; Montana, 455; Wyoming, 455; carpet- 
bag government, 558; western and lynch 
law, 559; American process, 564; effect of 
inefficient administration, 565; Oklahoma, 
569. See also Admission of States. 

Territory south of the River Ohio, 92; in 
abeyance, 118. 

Texas, and Louisiana Purchase, 184; phase 
of Jacksonian migration, 286, 303; under 
Spain, 303-05, 323; beginning of American 
settlement, Austins, 305; Americans and 
Mexicans, 306, 307; southerners, slaves, 
307, 353; Mexican opposition, 308; move- 
ment for independence, 308-10; civil war, 
310; recognition, 310; annexation treaty 
fails, 352; as issue, 352; annexation reso- 
lution, 353; constitution, statehood, 353, 
354; and war with Mexico, 354, 355; 
Taylor in, 355; boundaries, compro- 
mise, 371, 379; and Pacific railroads, 515, 
546, 547; cattle, breeding, 535, 536; 
Greer County claim, 568. See also Great 
Plains. 

Texas Pacific Railroad, charter, 515; and 


INDEX 


Southern Pacific, 546; land grant voided, 
552. See also Pacific railroads. 

Thames River, battle, 173. 

Three Notch Road, 174, 208, 209. 

Thwaites, R. G., frontier papers, 28n., 36n., 
137n., 151n., 156n., 179n. 

Tiffin, Edward, as democratic leader in 
territory, 124; governor, 129; Commis- 
missioner of Public Lands, 220. 

Time zones, 548. 

Tippecanoe, battle, 165, 166; effect, 166. 

Toledo, Ohio, canal route, 270; growth, 298; 
first railroad, 407. 

Toledo War, 270, 298, 299. 

Trails. See Roads; Routes. 

Transportation, frontier difficulties and 
interest, 150, 154, 402; camel corps, 459. 
See also Internal improvements; Rivers; 
Routes; Steamboats. 

Transylvania, 27, 29, 30; and statehood, 88. 

Travel, mixed means (1848), 407. See also 
Canals; Railroads; Roads; Routes; Steam- 
boats. 

Trist, N. P., negotiations, 359. a 

Tucson, early mining, 453, 454. 

Tupper, Benjamin, land survey, 64; and 
Ohio Company, 64. 

Turner, F. J., and frontier historiography, 
7n., 22n., 36n., 83n., 250n. 

Turnpikes, period, 151. 

Tyler, John, as president, 351; and Texas, 
352, 353; candidacy, 386; public-land ° 
policy, 390. 


Union, doubts, 43; and public lands, 43, 45, 
49, 50, 58; territorial ordinances on, 62, 69; 
Wayne’s expedition and Whiskey Insur- 
rection, 79; and territorial integrity, 82, 
86; and navigation of the Mississippi, 84; 
Washington and strong government, 87, 
102, 103; rise of Jeffersonian Democracy, 
103-11; dovtrine of economic determina- 
tion, 104; forces in Mississippi Valley 
frontier, 150; Cumberland Road, 153; 
economic of West, 157; frontier attitude, 
167, 241; original State sovereignty, 168; 
nationalists of second generation, 241; 
attitude of Jacksonian Democracy, 319; 
economic causes of nationalism, 481. See 
also Americanization; Federal Constitu- 
tion; Secession; Sectionalism. 

Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, 
and Wyoming Territory, 455; California 
beginnings, 468; charters, land grant, loan, 
469; financial difficulties, 494; slow con- 
struction, 495; amended grant, 495; junc- 
tion point, construction race, 495, 
496, 500; material difficulties, 496, 498; 
temporary terminal towns, 497; Chinese 
labor, 498; Missouri River bridge, 498; 
construction companies, Crédit Mobilier, 


INDEX 


499, 500; last spike, 500; effect on Indians, 
501; cattle shipments, 539. See also Pacific 
railroads. 

United States vs. Texas, 569. 

Utah, territorial government, 371, 379, 380; 
divided, 446, 450; isolation, 460; admission, 
571. See also Mormons; Rocky Mountain. 

Ute Indians, treaty and reservation, 505. 


Van Buren, Martin, Mexican claims, 356. 
Vancouver, George; in Oregon, 180. 
Vandalia scheme, 22, 23. 

Van Tyne, C. H., study of Revolution, 33n.; 
on State sovereignty, 43n., 168. 

Varnum, J. M., judge, 69. 

Vermont, controversy, 12, 13, 87, 88; ad- 
mission, 88. 

Vicksburg, Miss., and Pacific railroad, 429. 

Vigilance committees in California, 377, 560. 

Villard, Henry, and Northern Pacific, 544. 

Vincennes, Ind., and Quebec Act, 35; cap- 
ture, 39; Fort Knox, 165. 

Virginia, boundary controversies, 16, 28, 48; 
Culpeper (Fairfax) tract, 17; settlement of 
Valley, 23; upland settlement and local 
government, 24; cabin right, 25; and 
Northwest, Clark’s expedition, 36; western 
claim, northwestern cession, 49, 52-54; 
land warrants, reserve in Northwest, 53, 
73; and Kentucky, 87-90; and admission 
of West Virginia, 456. 

Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 109. 

Virginia City, Mon., mining camp, 453. 


Wabash and Erie Canal, 
grant, 272, 273. 

Wabash River, as Indian route, 38, 161, 193; 
settlement approaches, 162; canal route, 
270. 

Waiilatpu Mission, 335. 

Waite, M. R., granger decision, 531. 

Walk in the Water, lake steamboat, 298. 

Walla Walla River, fort, 336; center of settle- 
ment, 339; road from falls of Missouri, 452. 

Wallace, W. H., governor, 455. 

War of 1812, West Florida, 149; war hawks, 
150, 167, 170; frontier causes and aspect, 
161, 167, 171-73; grievances, 168-70; out- 
break, 170; unpreparedness, officers, 171; 
and advancement of frontier, 173, 178; in 
Southwest, 174, 175; finance, 176, 232, 235; 
peace negotiations, 176, 178; New Orleans, 
176, 177; results to West, 177; in Far West, 
179; land bonus, 189; advertisement of 
West, 189, 190. 

Ward, Joseph, Yankton, 449. 

Washington, George, land, desire, 17; mission 
to French, 18; capture, 19; on proclama- 
tion of 1763, 22; on doubts of Union, 43; 
and western lands, 60; and neutrality, 80, 
81, 107; and free navigation of the Mis- 


building, land 


597 


sissippi, 84; Spanish negotiations, 85; atti- 
tude toward government, effect, 87, 102; 
and Whiskey Insurrection, 107; and decline 
of Federalists, 108. 

Washington, Lawrence, Ohio Company, 17. 

Washington, territory created and enlarged, 
446; Rocky Mountain counties, 452; 
divided, 455; statehood movements, 557; 
and Idaho panhandle, 557; admission, 
560-63. 

Washita River, Custer’s Indian raid, 507. 

Watauga, settlement, leaders, 25-27; associa- | 
tion, 27; State of Franklin, 31. 

Watertown, Wis., railroad mortgages, 417. 

Wayne, Anthony, Indian expedition, 77, 78; 
diplomatic effect, 79. 

Wea Indians, and Fort Harmar Treaty, 75; 
cessions, 162, 432; western settlement, 282. 

Weaver, J. B., candidacy, 525. 

Webster, Daniel, as leader, 241, 420; belated 
nationalism, 241, 258; and Tyler, 352; and 
slavery in Far West, 370; occasion of 
Hayne debate, 381. 

Weller, L. H., papers, 526n. 

Wells, Fargo, and Company, 466. 

West. See Frontier. 

West Florida, British province, boundaries, 
10, 57; claim and occupation, 148, 149, 
174; Jockson’s invasion, 176, 181, 182, 
256. 

West Virginia, admission aS war measure, 
456. 

Western claims, and proclamation of 1763, 
10; described, cessions, 31, 49, 52-57, 91; 
political aspect, 47; and adoption of 
Articles of Confederation, 48-50; legal 
basis, 50. 

Western Engineer, Missouri steamboat, 158, 
ilo 

Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, 
260. 

Whalers, in Califorina, 364. 

Wheeling, W. Va., as gateway, 64, 126; Cum- 
berland Road, 152. 

Whig party, frontier phase, 338, 351, 386. 

Whipple, H. B., and Sioux War, 487. 

Whiskey Insurrection, diplomatic effect, 76; 
and strong government, 106. 

White, Elijah, in Oregon, 336, 339. 

White, H. L., Bank of Tennessee, 231. 

Whitewater Canal, 313. 

Whitman, Marcus, in Oregon, 335, 339. 

Whitney, Asa, and Pacific railroad, 427, 428, 
468, 514. 

Whitney, Eli, cotton gin, 201. 

Wilderness Trail, 29. 

Wilkinson, James, Spanish eC 84, 89, 
90; as agent at New Orleans, 134, 140, 
142; and Pike’s expedition, 141, 143; and 
Burr, 148, 144, 146-48; occupies West 
Florida, 149, 174. 


598 


Willamette Valley, settlement, 339. 

Wilmot proviso, 370. 

Winchester, James, River Raisin, 173. 

Winnebago Indians, range, 282; western 
settlement, 283, 290; war, 287; and Black 
Hawk War, 289. 

Winnipeg, Fort Garry, 215, 331. 

Winsor, Justin, study of frontier, 5n. 

Wisconsin, territory, 286, 292; settlement, 
287; early squatters, Dodge, 287; popu- 
lation (1836, 1838), 292, 293; divided, 293; 
centers of development, 293; Indian 
cession in upper, 293; lumber frontier, 293; 
and debt-ridden neighbors, 393; settlement 
areas, political characteristics, 396-98; 
enabling act, boundaries, 398; strife over 
constitution, significance, 398-401; ad- 
mission, 400; territorial fragment, 449; 
railway monopoly and regulation, 528. 
See also Northwest. 

Wisconsin Democrat, on sectionalism, 398. 

-Wisconsin River, canal route, 270. 

Wister, Owen, on Wyoming, 558. 

Women, of frontier, 115; property rights of 
married, 354, 399. 


INDEX 


Wyandot Indians, cession (1784), 61. 

Wyeth, N.J., Oregon expedition, 333. 

Wyoming, territory, causes, 455; and cattle 
industry, 558; admission, 563. See also 
Rocky Mountain. 

Wyoming Valley, controversy, 55. 


X Y Z correspondence, 108. 


Yankton, §.D., settlement, 449. 

Yankton County, 8.D., bonds case, 416, 557. 

Yankton Sioux, graft of agent, 503. 

Yazoo lands, 57. 

Yazoo River, settlement center, 
culture, 208, 209. 

Yellowstone, Missouri River steamboat, 331, 
302. 

Young, Brigham, Mormon trek, 345, 346; 
rule, 346, 347, 570; polygamy, 348; 
governor, 349. 5 

Yrujo. See Casa Yrujo. #4 


cotton 


Zane, Ebenezer, post and trace, 28, 73. 
Zane, Jonathan, post and alana 28, sony 
Zane’s Trace, 73. 


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